


up to 104% perfect

by winchysteria



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - The Good Place (TV) Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Check Please! Big Bang, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, F/M, Head Injury, M/M, POV Alternating, Soulmates, i don't know anything about computer programming and i don't do a good job of hiding that, it's the afterlife you know, technically everyone is dead but like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 15:20:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16663306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchysteria/pseuds/winchysteria
Summary: Will Poindexter and Derek Nurse finally know what happens after you die. You wake up in Hot God's office, you move into a really nice house, and-- you realize that you hate the person who's supposed to be your soulmate? Join a smug poet, a frigid computer nerd, and the rest of the Scooby gang as they ask questions like: what makes two people right for each other? what does it mean to be happy? does heaven get software glitches? and most importantly, why does this computer have a Southern accent?Welcome! Everything is fine.





	1. sponsored by otters holding hands

**Author's Note:**

> oh my god! look at [frida's](http://pretty-meris.tumblr.com) wonderful wonderful art!! look at [becca's](http://booboothedude.tumblr.com) wonderful wonderful betaing! thank u both so much for tolerating my tendency to message late at night and stretch deadlines like laffy taffy.  
> and thank u to the excellent mods of the check please big bang 2018 for enabling this!!!! "Check Please But The Good Place" was a dumb weird idea i had almost a year ago and now, now it is officially the longest thing i've ever written and i'm so pleased with the dumb weird story it grew up to be. thanks also to mike schur and ngozi ukazu for creating wonderful story playgrounds for me to stomp around in like a drunk dinosaur
> 
>  
> 
> I AM BEGGING U TO CLICK [HERE](http://pretty-meris.tumblr.com/post/180240942790) [HERE](http://pretty-meris.tumblr.com/post/180240969550) [HERE](http://pretty-meris.tumblr.com/post/180240990975) AND [HERE](http://pretty-meris.tumblr.com/post/180241088985) TO LOOK AT FRIDAS ART IT SLAYED ME RIGHT DEAD

Derek realizes at once that he doesn’t know where he is or how he got here, and also that he isn’t worried about it at all. His head feels clear and spacious in a way he thought he'd been imagining. Like how childhood was really just as ordinary as adulthood, but your brain lacquered it over with that golden shine. He feels washed out, but calm.

Across from his seat on the couch, which feels like nothing underneath him, a wall states simply "Welcome! Everything is fine." The letters are green, no serifs. If he walked forward and spread his arms out, he wouldn't reach both ends.

He looks down at his hands. They seem younger, more pliable. When he clenches and flexes them, he doesn’t feel any of the just-awake hesitance or the old aches and pains. His nails are perfectly clean, short and rounded at the tips.

To his left, a door he hadn't noticed swings wide. It looks, as the rest of the room does, like the office of many therapists he's seen over his lifetime. Blonde wood, those odd paperclippy stainless steel handles. The door opens inward, and in the gap appears a shockingly handsome white guy, with blue eyes like a young Ian McKellen. Derek doesn’t feel disoriented or slow, but he also realizes for the first time that he isn’t buzzing, either. His thoughts range out into the blank expanse of his brain in an orderly, nicely-paced fashion. Like a sidewalk instead of a herd. He thinks, unaffectedly, that it’s difficult to guess at this man's age-- he could be twenty or forty just as easily. When he smiles, his face creases, but it’s still flushed and new-looking. His hair is a dense dark brown. "Derek?" he says, nodding gently. "Please come in."

The next room-- heavy dark desk, two tufted chairs set on either side of it, leaded windows with the wobbly glass of an old church-- feels like a professor's office. Or the way professors' offices look in movies: peaceful, stoic, stuffed with books. Light slants generously in from their right as the man takes a seat behind the desk, motioning for Derek to take the other chair. "Derek, I'm Jack," he says in a reassuring baritone, with an accent peeking out around the edges. "How are you feeling?"

"I feel wonderful," Derek replies honestly.

Jack bobs his head in approval. “I’m sure you have questions, and I can answer all of them."

Derek nods expectantly.

“Well, Derek," Jack begins, somewhat hesitant. "You've died."

Derek can't find it within himself to be surprised. He casts around for distress, but he can't find any of that either. He doesn't feel dissociated or apathetic, just calm. "So this is, what, the afterlife?"

Behind Jack, he can make out labels on several of the shelves. He doesn't have to squint, and it doesn't hurt. Human History, 10,000 B.C.E. to 9,000 B.C.E. Non-human history, 5 million B.C.E to 4.9 million B.C.E. "Yes," Jack says, "and congratulations. You're in the Good Place."

That's all it takes for tears to spring to Derek's eyes, and he doesn't feel like he needs to fight them back. "It's over?" Derek asks.

Jack seems to understand, and he leans forward onto his elbows, hands clasped. "It's done, Derek."

 

* * *

 

Will's eyebrows lift in surprise. "I have a lot of relatives who'd be pretty angry that I'm here."

Jack laughs. God, he's handsome, whatever exactly he is. "Well, it's not the hell and heaven you were raised on, necessarily. All religions were a little bit right, about one thing or another, but none of them got much more than four or five percent correct."

"Huh," Will says. "And we felt so smart, too."

For some reason, there's a pedestal fan turning slowly in the corner behind Jack's desk. It oscillates quietly as Jack continues. "Actually, the best guess that humanity ever made about all of this came from John Johnson. He was a Boston-area college student in the late 1990s. He took LSD one day, and around seven hours into the trip, his best friend Chad asked what happens after we die. John talked for about ninety minutes straight. He was eighty-three percent accurate. We were all shocked."

Jack gestures to a five-by-seven picture frame on his desk, where a good-looking but generally nondescript guy, pupils red from the flash, smiles and waves a beer at the camera. "This is him. We keep the picture around to remind ourselves that humans are full of surprises."

Will nods as if this is exactly what he expected. Jack is looking at him expectantly, and he wonders if this is the Q-and-A part of the heaven experience. "So, um, what happens now? Exactly?"

Jack gestures to the window, and they walk over together. This office is on the second floor, it looks like, of one of many white-and-green buildings lining a cobblestone street. Illogically, Will can see along the winding, branching patterns of the town center, as if the window is a fisheye lens. Beyond the town, which trails off gently as it goes downhill, there is an improbable range of landscape. A hillside covered in redwood-sized trees, which are wearing spring-green and October-red foliage at the same time. A mountain with a ski slope carved down its front. A bamboo forest, a Versailles-style palace gardens; it’s all there, clustered together like the picture on the front of a board game.

“What is all this?” Will asks, breath caught just beneath his throat.

“This is your neighborhood,” Jack replies. “I designed it precisely for all three hundred and twenty-two of you, including a home for each resident, a wide variety of recreational land, and of course, the town itself.”

A few streets over, past cascading window boxes of yellow flowers, Will can see a town square adjacent to a park, like Disneyland without the unnerving cheeriness. People—well-dressed, well-fed—walk in undulating groups from place to place. They ebb in and out of a variety of storefronts. “How does this-- how does it work?”

Jack, having been lost in thought as they gazed down together, straightens up. “Oh, yes. Well, his place is pretty autonomous. All of these can be run automatically, but they can also be under the charge of any resident who so wishes. And, of course, Bittle can take over if need be.”

Will is not used to being a person with a lot of questions. He feels like a toy with a pull-cord and five catchphrases. But again, he asks: “Who is Bittle?”

Jack smiles knowingly, with a tilt that says he hasn’t forgotten. “We’ll get to all that. Now, are you ready for the tour?”

 

* * *

 

They have an English major on staff, Derek thinks in amusement as he clocks the names of the neighborhood businesses. The Burly Belgian, which looks like a waffle place; All Dogs Go to Heaven, which must be some kind of pet store. It's the pleasant kind of sunny, almost hot in dark clothing. Beside him, the white-blonde streaks in Bittle's hair glint-- he looks, Derek thinks, like someone's younger cousin dressed to be an usher at their outdoor wedding. Tan suit, pale green bow tie, clean-cut as a newscaster.

"So you're..." Derek begins. Bittle looks up at him, blankly pleasant expression fixed in place.

Derek opens his mouth, then closes it again. "Jack said you were some kind of operating system? What does that mean?"

For a-- computer? Bittle has stunningly good teeth. He flashes them as he answers. "I am the informational assistant for this neighborhood. I possess all of the knowledge you could possibly need about anything, and I am here specifically to attend to your needs. Not just you, of course; I'm available to any resident of the neighborhood at any hour. Once you're done with the tour, if you need anything at all, you just have to say 'Excuse me, Bittle' aloud. Go ahead and try it!"

He disappears so fast that Derek's brain refuses to process it. There's no visual effect, no delay, just a convincing replica of a human man one second and then, ding, gone.

The ding is literal. When Bittle evaporates, it sounds like an Alexa powering down.

Feeling somewhat self-conscious, Derek looks around at the neighbors milling in other parts of the square. He clears his throat. "Excuse me, Bittle?"

And he's back, but on Derek's other side for some reason. "See?" Bittle says.

He slides back into tour guide mode immediately, and Derek lopes alongside him. "Um, not to be rude," he starts.

"You can't possibly be rude to me," Bittle corrects with a knowing smile. "I am not a person and I cannot be offended."

"So what's Jack?" Derek blurts. "Is he, like, an angel or god or something?"

He squeezes his fingers together and tries to tell himself that there are no stupid questions on your first day in heaven. Bittle, weaving past an elegant blonde woman in tennis whites, replies, "No, no, he's the architect, which is a type of eternal being with intelligence on a scale that you can't understand, but he's not God. There are quite a few neighborhoods in the Good Place, and an architect is in charge of each, just like one Bittle is assigned to each. We're not human, but we are not deities either."

There’s only so much information that a person can absorb in a day. Derek simply nods and follows Bittle's brisk stride past a cat café called Beans Beans Beans. "Uh, what else should I know? About this whole... thing?"

“Oh, you’ll get a good overview in the orientation video,” Bittle says, and he gestures toward the park, where a small platform is surrounded by semicircular rows of chairs, as if at a high school graduation. “Go on ahead and sit down. I’ll be back to get you at the end.”

 

* * *

 

“Okay, if everyone has taken their seats?” Jack straightens the lapels of his navy suit.

With a brisk wave of Jack’s hand, a screen folds out of thin air, the way things seem to do here.  _ God, that’s hi-res _ , Will thinks. A woman in box braids and a red dress, with the same kind of ageless, polished look as Jack, steps jauntily into shot. “Hello, everyone!” she says. “And welcome to your first day in the afterlife.”

“If you’re here, that means you were good people,” she says. A swarm of green and red numbers fly up around her. “Grumbled loudly about a baby crying in a public place” has a negative 10.94; “held your friend’s hair even though they got you kicked out of the club” a positive 3.08.

“All of your actions on earth either added to or detracted from the well-being of the universe. Over the course of your life, our system kept track of them all, and the sum total of that score determined your place here. All of those times you worried over whether you were doing the right thing? When you  _ agonized _ over your choices?” She grimaces exaggeratedly, and the crowd chuckles. “Well those were all worth it. And now, you can relax.”

The whole thing reminds him of airline instructional videos-- that sense that they know you’d just like to get along with your business, but they’re obliged to tell you all these things. He zones out a little, finds himself scanning the faces in the crowd. All the other residents look that ghost-of-Christmas-future way that Jack does: hair loose, clothes new and well-fitted, so healthy they glow. He tunes back in when the crowd around him starts to gasp and whisper.

“That’s right,” the woman onscreen says, walking to stage left. The camera pans along with her to a pair of people who dramatically meet, hug, and then walk away from her into the sunset. “One of your neighbors is your soulmate, the most compatible person for you in the universe, and you’ll spend an eternity of bliss with them right here.”

Suddenly, Will is not the only one looking around at everyone else. Whatever the video woman has to say next is lost to the sea of people making shy eye contact with each other, and Will feels a teenagery flutter of excitement when any man lingers on him. It’s the same anticipation of leaning on the wall at a middle school dance waiting for girls to look at you, but without that insecurity about whether anyone would.

“This is your happy ending,” the woman says. “Are you ready to get started?”

And suddenly, that’s it, and before he has time to wonder if he missed anything important, Will hears Jack’s smooth voice at his shoulder. “You ready to see the rest?” he says.

 

* * *

 

Past the curry place, the ice cream place, and the braiding salon, Bittle takes a left turn. “This is your neck of the woods,” he says by way of explanation.

Derek imagines that the houses are laid out to match each other, or he does at first. Just at the beginning of the block, directly across from each other, there is a pair of matching storybook cottages, one with a cherry-red door and one with blue. They're surrounded by overflowing but clearly manicured gardens, the kind that his Mama's doctor friends often had at their beach houses, but of course those were managed by a landscaper or three. These have their own gardening benches tucked in among the tea roses.

"So these are my neighbor-neighbors," Derek says, Bitty having gone uncharacteristically quiet.

"Well these particular houses are still unoccupied," the O.S. replies, gesturing to the cottages. "Not all of our residents are here quite yet."

That strikes Derek as a little odd, but he's distracted by the next set of homes. Past the neat white fences of the cottages, there's a dilapidated, pleasantly psychedelic Victorian on one side, with tapestries hung in the front windows as if it's occupied by a hippie college student, and an eyesore of a warehouse on the other. They’re both a little overgrown, and a froggy chorus rises up from the decorative pond in front of the Victorian. Derek laughs. "Why-- how do these all, you know, fit together?"

Bittle smiles up at him. "Well, not aesthetically, I'll tell you what. But every person here gets to live in a home that perfectly matches their true essence. Some people like modern living spaces, some a little bit more--" he waves at the shabby estate. "Antique. We build them to your taste, and we decorate the inside exactly how you like it."

"And some people like castles," Derek says as they pass between a pair of beachy mansions, each as wide as half a city block. "I have to be honest, that's closer to what I expected. You know, diamond toilets or whatever."

"Well, humans imagine that they're happy in extreme circumstances," Bittle replies evenly. "Many of your religions describe things like streets of gold, perfect bliss, sometimes sex palaces. But really we just give you a roof over your head, make sure all of your needs and wants can be met, and, most importantly, surround you with other humans to be happy with.”

As they continue up the street, the manicured lawns give way to wilder vegetation-- a small forest on one side, a tangle of wild grass and flowers on the other. Bittle sniffs the air as they pass an overgrown lilac shrub. “All of our research-- which is an infinite amount-- indicates that you're happiest surrounded by the good things that you know."

They stop abruptly when the road turns into a cul-de-sac of sandy dirt. Bittle turns on his heel to face a fever dream of a house: a New York brownstone dropped into a rangy field like Dorothy’s house into Oz. Pale wisteria and shockingly pink roses climb up the walls in patches, and the long vegetation around the house is more paintbrush, poppy, and bluebell than grass. Derek loves this one immediately, and Bittle gestures toward it.

"Well, this is you."

 

* * *

 

The house is stupid perfect. That's the only way Will can think to describe it.

"We furnished it according to your preferences," Jack says, almost bashfully.

They built him something between a cottage and a log cabin. Right on the dividing line between a forest and an ocean-- a grove of shaggy pines and whispering birches, emerging from a cushion of needles and sandy soil, gives way through a scattering of acorns and twigs and pinecones to a pebbly beach at the edge of an army-green sea. The beach side of the cabin is on stilts, owing to the hill it's built on. The forest side is accessible through a modest front door at the end of a stony path. There are flowers in the window boxes and vegetable beds in the front yard-- an impossible combination of everything he loves about home.

Inside, there are simultaneously the overstuffed leather couches of his modest adulthood and the scratchy flannel blankets of his upbringing. The furniture is made of what looks like reclaimed wood, even as Will knows that everything here is bespoke. It's snug in a roomy kind of way, like wearing somebody else’s sweater. Against the far wall, a staircase disappears into a sleeping loft. To the right, there's a kitchen with generous counter space. All the way through the house, there's a sliding glass door out onto the porch, which is equipped with the same raw-pine furniture as the interior.

But it's the outdoors that Will wants to return to. The light around his cottage is gray, not the butter-yellow sun of the rest of the neighborhood. It's northern New England summer-- overcast, moving from clouded slate to watery white. His shadow appears weakly and then disappears again as Will stands right at the edge of the sand and fights back tears.

Next to him, Jack shuffles awkwardly. "If there's anything we haven't provided, don't hesitate to ask," he begins, but Will cuts him off.

"No, this is all perfect." And it is. Will hadn't known what to expect from the afterlife, but this comfortable space carved out for who he is wasn't it. Worst-case scenario, he'd pictured harps and white fire and judgment. Best-case, some kind of peaceful void. "Can I spend some time here?" he asks, finally, tearing his eyes away from the waves crashing gently a dozen yards away. “Before we get back to the orientation?”

"Oh, yes, of course,” Jack says. “I just need to introduce you to someone first. Excuse me, Bittle?”

Behind him, Will hears a cheerful software-update noise. He turns, unsure what to expect, and finds himself facing probably the most attractive human man he’s ever seen in real life. He looks like a Baroque painting of a tree nymph rising from his winter sleep-- sapling-graceful, as tall as Will, though perhaps not as broad through the shoulders. Dark brown curls rise up and back from his head, and against the deep green of the forest, his celery-colored eyes seem impossible.

“William,” Jack says simply. “This is Derek. He’s your soulmate.”


	2. whoa that's a dope prank

Justin Colin Oluransi: _Born Toronto, Canada. Educated Samwell University and Johns Hopkins. 40-year career in obstetrics and gynecology, noted expert on the effects of toxic stress on fetal health. See pages 3-17 for list of lives saved. Once spoke to Georgia Martin for several minutes at a sexual education convention, but does not remember it. Unfortunately an excessive user of his car horn._

* * *

Derek's soulmate stands out like a sandbar against the dark, stormy ocean. Backed by slate-colored waves and a dove-gray sky, he looks nothing like what Derek expected: tall, pale, defensive. He has pretty decent taste, based on the house and everything. Derek finds it a little off-putting that the cottage is so isolated, though-- theoretically, everyone else here is pretty nice.

He can’t remember this part of the spiel, but he chalks it up to the fact that he was just rudely transported via Southern Belle Express. "My  _ what _ ?"

"Soulmate," Will supplies. "You know, like they said in the video."

Well, he didn’t have to use that tone.

Derek was never too put off by social awkwardness-- at least, he wasn't before. He had this system going: if you speak a little slower, with your eyes closed just a bit, people will assume you're just taking the conversation really seriously, instead of floundering for your next thought. Now, though, Derek doesn't really know what to say. He tracks Will's eyes flitting down his body and back up again. It’s more curious than lecherous, but Derek still doesn’t know what to do with himself. He lets his own gaze linger on Will's broad shoulders and windswept autumn-red hair and the long fingers he's clutching so nervously in front of his torso. 

Bittle, somewhere off to the side, hums happily. "You know, I just love this part."

Derek glances his direction. Next to Bittle, Jack’s brow is furrowed in the middle, head cocked, like this is a duty he performs and the idea of loving it is unfamiliar. That makes the moment feel more real. Nobody's messing with him. Derek is just receiving the same service that everyone else does upon arrival to the afterlife.

Jack gestures between the two of them. "I can assure you that you'll be quite happy together.”

Will takes a tenuous step toward Derek. His arms flutter at his sides as if he's unsure what to do with them.

"Oh, we ought to give them some time alone," Derek can hear Bittle mutter. "That's what they do on the CW."

Then, aloud: “We’ll leave you to... enjoy your happy ending,” and then he and Jack pop into the ether again.

Alone, it's clear that neither Will nor Derek really knows what to do with the situation. "Hey, man," Derek says, taking mercy.

Will meets his eyes-- Derek hadn't noticed him looking away-- and cracks a nervous smile. "Hey."

Derek smiles back.

Something about the tension in Will’s shoulders makes him nervous.

 

It turns out that Derek and Will are each other’s closest neighbor, so they awkwardly roam through Derek’s backyard as they explore. At least seven butterflies land on Will as they cross through the grass, and he flinches and bats them away instinctively. Derek can’t help but feel offended on their behalf.

"So, what do you do? Or, what did you?" Derek asks as they round the corner of his house. The soulmate thing is-- weird, to say the least. This doesn't seem like a question one should be answering when you already know you’ve found the love of your life.

"I was a software engineer," Will says. "Kinda married to my job."

Derek nods. “I definitely get that.”

He fights back a surge of irritation as Will swats ungracefully at an oversized stem of Queen Anne’s lace.

"So, uh, what did  _ you _ do?" Will asks. "You know, when you were alive?"

It’s such a boring question. And one that rarely ends with both parties satisfied, at least in Derek’s case. "I was an activist. And I wrote poetry."

From long experience, Derek recognizes the look in Will’s eyes. It’s the “okay, hippie” look. This is the part where you’re supposed to ask more: what was your cause? Anything I’ve read? But the Look doesn’t bode well. The Look identifies Will as one of those people who smiles and nods and privately wonders how you pay your bills. Well, whatever,  _ Poindexter _ .

Derek tries to tell himself not to be dramatic.

Still, it feels like an intrusion to let Will through his front door. He’s already begun thinking of the house as a person, and he silently apologizes to her as he walks Will through the living room, the kitchen, even up the stairs and to his bedroom. 

The way they’ve decorated his home-- jewel tones and warm whites, suffused with so much natural light that the dark Turkish rugs look almost pastel-- means that any rejection of it feels personal. It’s kind of nice, then, that Will is so quiet as they walk through. Though Derek hears him hum as they pass the overfilled hallway bookshelf, and he’s annoyed by the thought of Will judging his taste in writing.

 

* * *

 

Will swears he had grown past this kind of thing. He swears. But he also sort of thought he grew out of religion-- logically, he used to say, it’s a non-starter to even get into the metaphysical, so what’s the point-- and there he was, in fucking heaven on a literal golden sidewalk leading up to the house of a man who looks like a statue. A Michelangelo, specifically, with a torso done on one of the sculptor’s thirstier days. The kind of skin you rolled your eyes at in a moisturizer commercial. He greets Will and Derek grandly from his enormous glass front door.

And simultaneously, in a typical turn of events, Will is actively restraining his urge to punch his soulmate.

He saw the way Derek looked sideways at him when their old jobs came up. And, okay, sure, Will might have spent his college years squinting at a computer screen in a dark room, but he could still appreciate the arts. If he wanted to. Admittedly, Will had been forced to take a creative writing workshop when he couldn’t fit any other English gen eds into his schedule, and he didn’t love it. But he didn’t like Derek’s little “not that  _ you’d _ know” look. Not at all.

But goddammit, this is paradise, and so this thing with Derek will work out. He smiles at him, tight-lipped, and follows him up the walk to their next closest neighbor’s house.

Justin, who is somehow even better-looking up close, has the kind of house Will would expect of Paradise, if he'd ever known to expect it to be a neighborhood full of custom homes. It looks very Malibu, expensive to heat and difficult to clean, like the house a celebrity might stay in for three months out of the year. There are a lot of black granite surfaces and floor-to-ceiling window installments. And the couches, of course, are right-angled memory foam monstrosities long enough to hold several Justins in a row. They could use a couple of pillows, Will thinks idly. Just for comfort's sake.

Justin is a nice guy, if a little distant. Effortlessly cool, but he seems to lean back into the expected mannerisms of such a Cool Guy right as the conversation got interesting.

Justin's soulmate, Chris, is puttering around the equally bougie, if a little more traditional, place right across the street. It has a lot of pale pine furnishings and indoor palms, and the French doors onto the porch lead, illogically, to a stretch of grass-peppered beach sand, then a regulation hockey rink, then another beach leading to something convincingly ocean-like.

Will crouches down in the sand at the edge of the rink, digging his fingers into the dividing line between beach grass and pure featherlight snow. He thinks he can feel Derek dithering, mentally urging him not to be so weird.

"The engineering here is crazy," Will says.

Chris laughs. More things he does could be described as not-laughing; it'd save time. "They don't really need engineers to do this stuff here," he points out.

Will looks at him sharply. "Everybody needs engineers," he says.

 

So far, Will and Derek agree on one thing: they both take to Larissa immediately. Her house is unexpected, to say the least, but its industrial ugliness is sort of a relief after Justin and Chris’s luxury. It's warehouse-sized like theirs, but it seems to be an actual warehouse, rather than a series of pointless furnished rooms. In fact, Will isn't sure it's a house at all-- between the exposed piping and the two-story canvases, this seems like Paradise's shameful back bedroom, where the unfinished projects went. But when Derek shouts "Hello?" into the refreshingly cool, dusty air, Larissa appears over the half-wall of a loft in the front right corner. "Hey," she calls before sliding to the floor on a fireman's pole.

Larissa is small, effortlessly cool, and seems-- from the mussed-up hair and the socks in flip-flops-- to have been napping. "You just wake up?” Derek asks, and Will wishes he’d have any manners. At all.

They learn from Larissa that they are never to call her by her first name-- "L is fine, or dude, or fuckface, but I really haven't gone by Larissa since I was old enough to pronounce it and realize it sucks"-- and that her soulmate is a guy named Adam who lives a block over, and that the weed in heaven is "pretty fucking fantastic." Will quietly files this information away.

They agree that they can call it a day at the end of their street-- there are a couple houses left, but nobody seems to be home in the condemned Victorian or the matching cottages. Besides, Jack said there were hundreds of people here, and there's only an hour or so before that party. And both of them want to have some time alone, Will can tell. He himself feels like he needs to be shut off and plugged into a wall. Derek probably needs to go sit in front of a mirror and stare into his own eyes or something.

* * *

 

"Here goes nothing," Derek hears Will mutter under his breath, and they step together into Justin's stupid-big mansion. Derek, meanwhile, has decided that this is going to be a damn good party, but that’s really just his stubborn streak talking. He wasn’t huge into most parties on earth-- the noise, the closeness, but mostly the way that everyone seemed determined to one-up each other instead of having a conversation. Artists were his people, in a lot of ways, but getting together with them at conferences and things always felt like a dog show everyone pretended they hadn’t trained for.

This seemed a little more relaxed, though, at least on the surface. Never mind the presence of the world’s least enthusiastic plus one.

"Do you think we have to dress up for this?" Will had asked Derek awkwardly on their walk back to their end of the street.

"It's not like they can tell us what to do," Derek replied, feigning more confidence than he felt, and Will just shrugged.

Will does, unfortunately, look fantastic, even though he’d only made the move from jeans a flannel to jeans and an olive-green button-down. When he rang Derek’s doorbell--"you don't have to pick me up, man. It's not prom," except for it sort of is, and the only idea Derek hated more than going to this party was going by himself-- Derek had flung the door open with some kind of goofy bit about a gentleman caller. But that only worked until he remembered 1) how well Will’s jeans fit, and 2) how infuriating he was.

The vibe in Justin’s mansion is neither uptight and insecure nor raucous and fratty. It's a homey in-between, and Justin's playing something Queen-y that Derek definitely doesn't hate at a totally reasonable volume.

Before he’s even finished with that thought, Justin himself barrels out of the crowd with a truly enormous smile. "Hey guys!" he calls, holding a tumbler, a wine glass, and two beers over his head as he moves past jostling groups of people. "Dogfish Head for Derek, rosé for Will--" he hands them out like a waiter at a busy restaurant-- "how are you fellas doing?"

"How did you--" Derek starts, staring at the bottle in his hand.

Justin winks. "Bitty's tending bar, and he's fast as hell, and he knows everything about everyone."

"Everything?" Derek says, wiggling his eyebrows.

Will rolls his eyes.

"Don't think about it too much," Justin laughs, not skipping a beat. "Sorry gentlemen, excuse me, but I think these two belong to the folks behind you--"

As he stumbles out of the way, Derek turns to see L-- white romper, black studded combat boots-- entering with an enormous blond guy who must be Adam. Like everyone else here, he's hot, but Derek still doesn't expect the audible reaction from Justin, who seems for the first time to lose his effortless cool.

Derek is ninetieth-percentile tall, and Justin has an inch or so on him, but Adam is somehow still taller. Justin's manic smile softens to something with more creases, something less practiced. "Who has the Jack and Coke?"

"I think that’s me," Adam says, smiling back with gigantic white teeth. He looks a little dazed, which is understandable given Justin’s whole face situation, but there’s something else in the air around them. That feeling that time is out of step between the world of the party and the world of Adam-and-Justin, which has suddenly burst into being.

"That's my drink too," Justin says, after a pause. "You have good taste."

Adam bobs his head. "I like to think so."

L, totally unbothered, grabs her forgotten Heineken from Justin's other hand and sidles up to Will and Derek. "'Sup, boys," she says. "Think they have food here?"

She slips a hand into each of their elbows and steers them toward a promising-looking buffet table. Derek can’t quite stop himself from looking back over his shoulder, far enough to confirm that Adam and Justin are still grinning at each other like fools.He sees Adam tap Justin's shoulder with his fist-- it's charmingly awkward-- before he turns back around.

L takes off toward a plate of deviled eggs, and as soon as she’s out of earshot, Derek pokes Will in the bicep. “Did you think that was weird?”

“What?” Will replies, taking a half-step back.

Christ. “Adam and Justin,” he stage-whispers. “Like, L seems very chill with the fact that they definitely just fell in love.”

“They did not,” Will says. He takes a bitchy sip of his rosé. “They have soulmates. We’re not on  _ Sex and the City _ .”

“Then why are you drinking pink wine?” Derek shoots back.

He regrets it for about five seconds.

They take a lap, probably out of desperation to talk to anyone else. Derek sort of loves Justin's place. It looks like the set of the Jonas Brothers TV show. Everything comes in huge, shiny surfaces-- the marble counters, the mirrored walls, the enormous windows onto the balcony. He pictured owning a place like this back when he still aspired to an NHL salary.

It’s somehow reassuring that Derek’s gut still aches when he thinks about that. Not as badly as it did in his early twenties, but still tender to the touch. He'd had an odd fear that all his bad memories and feelings would have disappeared in the transition to Paradise. His demons were a part of him; it’d feel cheap to suddenly forget all of that.

"I'm pretty sure this house got lifted straight from my teenage wet dreams," he comments to Will.

Will snorts. "Yeah, it's a little ostentatious, isn't it?"

"I mean, I still like it," Derek says. He’s spent maybe an hour with Will, total, but the guy definitely has a cynical streak that Derek doesn’t intend to get bogged down in. "Like, you could take that TV down from the wall and play pool on it."

"But then where would you and the other 80s teen movie villains hang your oversized white blazers?" Will asks.

Derek chooses to take this as a joke. "Well, we’d have to take it down anyway," Derek replies, deadpan. “Where else would we do lines?”

The party doesn't exactly fly by, but it's okay. They meet a giant with a Russian accent named Alexei, who is to friendliness what Clifford is to being big and red. A snippy blonde guy Derek kind of hates, Ken or something. A girl with network-television-shiny brown hair and a killer handshake who introduces herself as Vanessa. 

And then towering jock after towering jock.

His nerves are getting a little raw. The blustery, physical familiarity of all these guys makes him claustrophobic. They seem to gather naturally around L, and Will-- he should have known Will had a bro side hidden under all butt-clenching-- keeps up just fine. Derek doesn't normally drink much, but he pats Will on the arm and excuses himself for a third beer.

At the bar, Eric gives him what looks like a caring once-over. "Another?" he says, and Derek shouldn't have expected him to ask if he's okay. He's a computer system, not a person; Derek is a grown-up.

"This is a great party," Derek says, for the sake of delaying his return to giant-man-land.

Bitty nods. "According to all y'all's good memories, this was the ticket for getting you to bond. If I felt happiness, I'd be just pleased as punch at how well everyone is getting along with each other. This is just my favorite part of getting these neighborhoods started, is seeing all these people who were meant to be together-- well, be together! Like you and Will!"

Derek nods, taking a long swig of his drink, and glances over to his soulmate. The whole group of them is bubbling with amiable energy, and Will seems more contented with them than he is with Derek.  _ You’re not a wimp _ , Derek reminds himself, and prepares to reenter the fray.

Then he sees Justin punch Adam on the arm hard enough to send him stumbling back a little.  _ No, no, no _ , Derek thinks, and he spins away from them and toward the sliding door to the patio.

You can't hyperventilate in heaven, he realizes as he sits down heavily on the pool deck steps. He still puts his head in his hands, breathes carefully in one nostril and out the other. So all the old wounds aren't there, not really. But the reflexes are. 

He lies back, feeling the cold of the raw cement through his jacket, and stares up at the stars. He's never seen this many in one place. The closest he's ever gotten, he thinks, was a childhood trip to Yellowstone. He’d looked up from the campfire to realize that the cerulean-glazed sky was only inches away; he’d reached up to touch it. "What are you doing?" Mom had asked with a laugh in her voice. Derek was so disappointed that he couldn't hold a star in his hand that he started to cry, and Mom had pulled him close to her side and rested her head firmly on top of his.

Looking up at the sky here, he feels that same lovely emptiness. Like the sound a glass bottle makes when you blow across it.

 

* * *

Will is trying desperately not to be irritated with Derek.  _ He's your soulmate, he should know you don't like to be left alone at parties _ , the petty side of his brain says.  _ He just met you, he obviously won't know everything about you right away _ , the well-trained side of his brain says. He's not used to feeling so teenaged and needy, and he doesn't like it, but he chalks it up to the long day and the deluge of new things, nice as they are. Even the neighbors-- whose stiffness had worn off like the foil on a lottery ticket-- are getting overwhelming. He feels a millionth of a second behind them already, like all he can really think about is the coil tightening in him, and how he has to really make an effort to enjoy this.

The group starts to move towards an incongruously cheap-looking ping-pong table. It's kind of gross, that green vinyl that brought a million college parties back to mind, and Will thinks that he likes Justin a little more for choosing that. He even considers following them. They were the type of people that didn't hide whether or not they liked you. They overflowed with wanting you around. It was nice.

But he’s not here by himself. It’s too late for him to make a great first impression on Derek, but they’re soulmates. He can fix this, if he tries, and he has it on the word of the actual real universe that the two of them will work out. No matter how unhelpful the aforementioned soulmate is being about the whole thing. He tells Chris that he's going to hunt down Derek, and Chris says enthusiastically to come back when he found him.

God, Will feels like an asshole, but the finely fermented guilt of needing another person around isn't washing away the annoyance that Derek left at all. He’s tipsy enough to wonder if the people around him can see the steam start to come out of his ears.

He goes to the bathroom first, which is tastefully expensive just like everything else in the house, and he splashes water onto his face before drying it with the softest towel he's ever felt in his life. With a pleased jolt, he ponders the idea of showering in heaven. Now that, that'll make today worth it.  _ Calm down _ , he thinks to the ageless version of himself in the mirror.

Once Will feels like he's shoved the irritation down far enough, he goes looking for Derek in earnest. He’s not in any of the bathrooms, nor on any of the couches, and he can't see him in conversation with any of the neighbors. Surprised not to find Derek in any of the brightly lit places, Will finally stumbles onto him on a quiet deck next to Justin’s pool.

Derek is prone on one set of the patio steps, but he looks undamaged. "Hey, where'd you go?" Will asks, hating himself for how obvious the answer is, but Derek blessedly doesn't take the bait.

"Sorry," he says instead, drawing out the  _ y _ .

On a different day, with a different person, Will would try harder to be patient, but try as he might he can't find the willpower right now. He should probably ask what's wrong, the nice half of his brain says, but he was never good at prying. He hated it when other people tried to make him talk when he wasn't ready.

So instead, he notices that the stars are ridiculous and the moon is brighter than it has any right to be and that the silver-lit version of Derek is just as soul-punchingly beautiful as all of the other versions so far. “Whatever. Not everyone likes parties," he says.

"Oh, the party's fine," Derek says. "Just not… feeling it today."

Will realizes that Derek is a little drunk, too. It’s why he holds Derek’s gaze for a second, then two, then three. There’s suddenly heat low in Will’s stomach. He grinds his teeth, trying not to find any scrap of emotional intelligence capable of dealing with the situation.

Instead, he asks, simply, "Wanna go home?"

 

The street in front of Justin’s house is largely unpopulated. Everything is bathed in that same platinum moonlight, and all the shadows look deep blue, and the lingering clumps of people on the lawn seem occupied. "Does that house make you kind of sad?" Derek asks, pointing to the empty cottage on the corner, and Will shakes his head.

"She'll get here," he says.

"’S a little weird this place has like. Rolling admissions though,” Derek replies. Will tries not to want to bite his head off, but it doesn’t work for long.  _ Be a grownup be a grownup be a grownup _ , he tells himself, and then Derek starts checking his nail beds like a snotty high schooler.

“I swear to god!” he finally bursts. “Do you  _ want _ something to be wrong with this place?” As Derek turns to toward their end of the street, the tails of his weird emerald-green pirate coat sweep out behind him.

“Oh, that’s pretty funny coming from you, Mr. Architectural Digest,” he snarks, outpacing Will by several steps. “You sure I shouldn’t be in hell for liking high ceilings or something?”

This is really something Derek wants to start in the middle of the night, apparently. He heads up the walkway to his townhouse alone, but Will stomps up behind him. “Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you, dude? Why are you trying to stir up shit on your  _ first day in the afterlife _ ?”

When Derek reaches his front stoop, he whips around to face Will again, unbuttoned cuffs flapping as he throws his hands in the air. He’s properly yelling now: “Why are you so obsessed with whether or not everyone’s  _ behaving _ correctly on their first day in the afterlife? Can you just fucking  _ chill _ ?”

It echoes across the placid cul-de-sac, even though Will is right there. He’s maybe six inches away, close enough to see the tiny beauty mark on Derek’s exposed right collarbone, and that’s when he shorts out. If he’d had a clever response in mind, it’s gone forever.

Will reaches forward without thinking, obeying the burning  _ something _ in his stomach, to grab the open sides of Derek’s shirt and kiss him. Fiercely, mouth open. Like he’s starting a fight.

He pulls back almost immediately, embarrassed, and starts to apologize.  _ Oh god fucking fuck _ , he thinks, but then Derek tugs him forward.

They crash into his front door, locked together at the hips; Derek’s right hand grips Will’s hair hard enough to hurt even as his left fumbles with the doorknob. Just inside, Derek pins him to the wall under the staircase and rocks against him, kissing him as if he could win a title belt for it. He drags his tongue across the roof of Will’s mouth, and Will shudders before pushing Derek’s shirt off his shoulders.

There’s no shyness, no secrecy about how this is going to end and how quickly they’ll get there. He can feel his own pulse in his ears and Derek's where Will latches onto his neck, soaks up Derek’s sharp inhale and the way he reaches under Will’s shirt and scratches with blunt nails down his back. When he feels Derek start to fumble with the button of his jeans, he arcs up against him, close as it’s possible to get, and groans into Derek’s mouth.

Then breaks the kiss again to pay attention to the smooth skin underneath Derek's ear. He bites down, just a little, and another spark of arousal shoots through him as he hears Derek's heavy breathing go high-pitched. "Bed," Derek says desperately, and Will nods, steps back, gestures lead the way.

The something-burning groans happily when Derek falls backward, willing and open, onto his own spotless white comforter. He fumbles impatiently with the rest of his own clothing, and Will can see his eyes go dark as Will unbuttons his shirt. They waste little time shedding everything else.

He crawls over Derek, mouth a hairsbreadth away from a kiss, and rolls their hips together. “ _ Fuck _ ,” Derek hisses before biting down on Will’s shoulder.

Will tucks his head, traces a wet line down Derek's stomach to his cock. He takes him apart with his mouth.


	3. you refer to lovemaking as "pounding it out"

Poindexter, William J:  _Born Steuben, ME, educated Northeastern and UC San Diego. Holds many significant security software patents. Most famously associated with false-analog voting interface, first used in the election of U.S. President Alice Atley. Bumped into Christopher Chow in the freezer aisle of a Safeway and thought he was hot, but will not remember this. Lost points for telling his friends about that study that claimed pet dogs don't love you._

* * *

 

Derek wakes with a start, one side of his face pressed so hard into the pillow that it's hard to open his left eye. He wonders if he'll sleep like a rock every night in the Good Place, or if it's a direct result of two rounds of spectacular angry-athletic sex. Either way, that'll take some getting used to.

Will's freckled, muscular shoulders curve out from underneath the comforter and away from him. _Shit_ , he thinks.

Not about the sex-- although that might have been a mistake-- but he remembers what he realized in the hazy darkness after round two. _Shit, shit, shit_.

There's nothing for it but to tell Will. Still, he gets out of bed quietly, trying not to disturb Will's sleep, to make breakfast. Derek isn't a total dick.

"Hey," he mumbles as he triple-checks the instructions on the pancake mix. "I got some bad news-- no, that’s a terrible way to start."

He produces a bowl of something half-lumpy and half-brothy and all-disgusting before he remembers.

"Bittle," he says quietly.

The kitchen stays silent.

“Excuse me, Bittle?” he tries again. Derek struggles not to jump when he pops into being on his right.

Bittle takes in Derek's near-nakedness and mussed-up hair with total professionalism. "How can I help you?" he asks cheerfully.

"Can I get some pancakes?" he asks. "Enough for, uh, two people?"

There's that bubbly update sound again, and Bitty hands him a heaping platter of food. He has to quickly set it down on the kitchen counter as Bittle hands him two matching plates. Then two sets of silverware. Then a clear, iHop-style pot of syrup. "Anything else?" he asks. "Some mimosas? A single long-stemmed rose in a bud vase? Massage o-"

"No, no, nope, that's plenty, Bittle," Derek says, flustered. He's sure he's imagining the amusement at the corners of Bitty's smile. "Thanks so much."

"No need to thank me," Bittle says. "This is literally my purpose in life." He pops back into nothingness as Derek hears the top of his stairs creak.

Will is still stupid-hot in his hand-carved-wooden-figurine way. The sunlight does great things for his new-penny-colored hair. "Did you make all this?" he says disbelievingly as he enters the kitchen, and there's a thread of fondness in his voice that Derek has to snip right away.

"No, I asked Bittle," he says quickly. "Never a good cook."

The possibly-imaginary soft edge to Will's face fades somewhat. "Well, thank you, that was thoughtful," he says, and Derek drops the bomb as he's loading up his plate.

"So, I don't think we're soulmates."

 

It doesn't seem possible for a person to eat pancakes with righteous fury, but Will's trying. "You can't possibly know that," he repeats, and Derek rubs his temples, elbows braced on the kitchen table.

"Yes I can," he says. "I mean, think about it. Do you even like me? Have you enjoyed one second of the time we've spent together?"

Around the edges of Will's irritation, Derek catches something small and abandoned-looking. He wants to punch himself in the face, just a little bit. "I thought we were finally, you know, getting along," Will says awkwardly, motioning up towards the second floor and Derek's bedroom.

"That wasn't _soulmate sex_ ," Derek replies, failing to be as gentle as he'd like. "That was sex you write about while you’re smoking a cigarette off your Brooklyn balcony three years after the affair of your life, slowly becoming aware that you’ll never find your soulmate, not really.”

The sad, small expression that Will was threatening is well gone, replaced with a stony annoyance. “That’s the douchiest, most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, I was depressed douche, so fine," Derek says.

After a pregnant pause, Will huffs. "You know what?” he says, stabbing a pancake as if it got a promotion he deserved. “You fucking suck.”

Derek rolls his eyes and tries again. "You're a logic guy, right? Think about-- your house, okay? Think about how everything in it is exactly right, you walk in and it just feels like you fit into it like a puzzle piece. I'm right, aren't I?"

"Sure," Will snips. "For the sake of this exercise, sure."

"Even the things you're surprised by-- they're all perfect."

"Fine," Will says, picking up his plate and walking to the kitchen.

"Do I feel like that to you?" Derek asks, thanking the universe that he doesn't have to look Will in the eye for this. "Because if I'm honest, you don't feel like that to me."

It's absolutely silent for a second, and then Derek cringes at the sound of a plate dropping to the tile counter. It won't break, he hopes, because this is the Good Place, but it doesn't sound promising.

"Oh, really?" Will spits as he comes back into Derek's line of sight and braces his hands on the dining chair opposite him. "Do I not feel like some empty object that was built around you and your preferences? Is that not everything you dreamed of in a person?"

"That's not what I meant, and you'd know that if you took five fucking seconds to try and see what I'm--"

"You think I can't understand your fucking poet bullshit? You think that's conclusive fucking evidence?" Will is shouting in earnest now, and Derek stands up from the table to meet his eyes.

"I think that you're willfully ignoring me because it's better for your counter-intuitive, resigned, sad-ass need for order!"

Will throws his hands into the air. "Because it's _so_ much more likely that we're some special tragic case while every single other person around us is doing just fine with this system--"

Derek has the feeling that he's turning just as red as Will, but he can't stop. "I know how I feel!" he yells, feeling silly. "Don't fucking tell me that I can't trust myself!"

Neither of them hear the gentle chime that precedes Jack’s appearance on Derek’s TV. Their voices only fall when he's well into his first sentence. Embarrassed, Derek turns to face the the screen. "--on the main park lawn. As with every other welcome event, I hope to see you all there. Again, day two of orientation will begin in exactly half an hour, that's nine A.M., on the main park lawn. We hope to see you there."

Derek deflates somewhat. He’s not done being angry, but his momentum is stopped, and so he looks at Will when he whirls toward him. "Well, go get ready, asshole,” Will says. “You're not going to ruin everything here for me."

 

* * *

 

Will squints into the bright sunlight of the park. The weather near his house is almost always perfect, but the public spaces tend to be a little oversaturated for him.

He is aware of the burning thing, still. Derek walks next to him, looking impossibly relaxed for the fact that he's the number-one pain in Will's ass right now. "Whatever you think is going on, Derek, just fucking fake it for me for a little while. Okay? Let me be a normal citizen of heaven, or whatever."

“Sure, great plan, dickweed,” Derek replies. They’d both tried to be patient yesterday, although Will’s only realizing it now that he’s faced with the evidence of how little Derek likes him. “Let’s just play Brady Bunch instead of actively trying to solve a problem.”

"A problem we don’t even know we have,” Will hisses, and he drops to a whisper as they pass by some of the neighbors. “We’re gonna go learn to play golden harps or something, because we're in _fucking_ heaven and that's what you do, surrounded by all the other happy pairs of good people who got into the nice half of the afterlife, _not pitching a fit_." He still isn't used to the fact that he doesn't sweat here, and wipes a hand under his hairline out of habit.

"So you're just going to pretend you want me to be your soulmate-- because what, you're self-conscious?"

Annoyingly, Will's customary power move of walking slightly faster than whoever was pissing him off in order to get them out of breath does not work here. Or maybe it doesn't work on Derek. Either way, he finally gives up the ghost, planting himself partway up the hill and turning sharply to face Derek. "I haven't even decided if I think you're nuts or not," he hisses. "Let's start there. And forgive me if I'm hesitant to come out and say that in this perfect world full of perfect things, the fact that you and I aren't getting along perfectly after twenty-four hours is worth making a huge deal about. Everybody else seems to be figuring it out just fine. We can do that too."

Derek has the audacity to set his shoulders back and laugh-- short, sharp, not particularly amused. "First of all, can you un-clench?" Will might kill him right there in the park, were it possible to kill people here. "Second of all, fine, no, I'm not going to do anything until we’re on the same page. But come on, man. Don't you want that happy ending they keep promising us?"

For reasons that Will chooses not to examine, this hurts. It's something about how good Derek still looks, and how his voice sounds soft when he asks the question. Like he means it.

Will remembers their argument that morning. The hurt disappears.

"I did just fine without one on Earth," he snaps, and continues up the hill at speed. Derek mercifully lets him go.

They're not first in the crowd by a long shot. Jack stands on the platform at the front in a navy suit and a white button-down, never mind the heat. He's increasingly better at imitating human mannerisms, but when he cranes his neck to look at Bittle, shining to his right, Will's neck hurts.

"Thank y'all for coming!” Bittle says. “I'm told that this is a real fun day for humans. Today, you’ll be learning to fly!

He pauses, and a gentle round of applause puffs up from the gathered neighbors. Well, mostly gentle. The jocks from last night let out an enthusiastic whoop somewhere behind them.

“Up here, to my right,” Bittle continues. “You'll find a selection of one-size-fits-all flying jumpsuits. Once yours is on, please proceed up to the platform and stand on the launch pad. As I’m sure you’ve all heard, souls get light when they’re full of joy, so you’ll need to pick a happy memory--"

Will and Derek snort simultaneously. "Very Peter Pan," Derek mutters.

Will hates him.

It’s still kind of funny.

Chris steps onto the platform first. "Pick something happy! Remember that it'll have to be potent," Bittle says as he clips Chris's helmet under his chin. If Will's impression of Chris is at all correct, he won't have any trouble with that.

Sure enough, he closes his eyes tightly for half a second, unleashes one of his million-watt grins, and springs up from the launchpad without any apparent effort.

"Did he even bend his knees?" Will asks under his breath. Derek hums in agreement as they both watch the tiny Chris-shaped figure arc behind them across the cornflower sky. He's whooping with glee, and they can all hear an edge of his happy shouts when he passes back overhead.

"All right, who's next?" Bitty asks cheerfully.

Before long, there are dozens of people zipping around a hundred feet or so above the neighborhood, bright as seaglass. But it's not easy for everyone. Will and Derek are nearly at the front of the line, zipping up suits and adjusting goggles, when Justin steps onto the pad.

Distinctly, now, Will can hear Bitty murmur, "You know the drill. Think of something happy."

Justin closes his eyes and furrows his brow in concentration.

As he stands there, the park starts to go quiet. First the front of the line, then pairs and clumps of neighbors standing farther back are distracted from their conversations by the utter stillness on the platform. Will sees Justin open one eye and look down toward his feet to see if he's managed to lift off. When he closes his eyes again, Will recognizes the tension gathering in Justin's neck and shoulders. He cringes sympathetically as the silence becomes stickier and more complete.

"Maybe I can't do it," he can barely hear Justin whisper to Bitty.

"Of course you can," Bitty says at clueless top volume. "You may need to relax into it."

Under the chirping birds, an almost-silent wave of whispers begins in the line behind Will and Derek. The neighborhood is full of good people, sure, but nobody can resist murmuring their curiosity. It might be worse than the silence.

"YEAH JUSTIN!" someone booms suddenly, not too far from Will. "FUCK YEAH! KILL THE GAME! AND THAT IS A _GREAT COLOR ON YOU_!"

Justin's gaze locks onto the speaker, and he half-rolls his eyes in a way that's immediately betrayed by his enormous smile. Will follows his line of sight to see Adam, the massive blonde guy from last night, shouting louder than Will thought humans could get, and apparently not at all self-conscious about yelling from the middle of a silent crowd. He wolf-whistles.

In the half-second that Will's not looking, Justin shoots up at least ten feet into the air. The crowd starts to wake up, beginning with a loudly applauding L, and when Justin becomes a crimson speck in the sky, they've all broken into raucous cheering.

He glances over to Derek. "Hey, it's our--"

Derek is looking back into the crowd. To Adam, who's gone quiet, smiling up at the sky and holding a private little thumbs-up.

"It's our turn," Will tries again, irritated. Derek huffs and follows him up onto the platform.

In some kind of assholey chivalry, Derek insists that Will go first. You're not going to fuck this up for me, Will thinks, and he closes his eyes, and he knows before he's done thinking about that first election-- the explosion of blue and white balloons-- that he's taken off.

He feels peaceful. Really peaceful. The surge of motion that sends him spiraling toward the distant ski mountain comes from somewhere behind his diaphragm, the place that tenses up when he realized he had become happy without knowing it.

He feels the way he used to when he woke up on the first day of summer as a kid. He’d forgotten that feeling was possible.

 

* * *

 

"Good morning, Archie Andrews!" Derek calls as he pounds on Will's front door. It's immature, but something about Will just brings that side of him back-- the hair-trigger sensitivity and the selfishness. He's not proud of it, but seeing as how Will causes it, Will can deal with it.

The door doesn't open right away, but that only satisfies Derek more. Will's a morning person, he already knows, so he's actively choosing to deal with the racket to piss Derek off, which means Will is petty too. "Rise and shine, asshole!" he shouts happily.

When Will finally whips the door open, Derek almost punches him in the face. On accident.

He wonders if you could physically fight somebody in heaven. It doesn't seem very ethical, or whatever, but if this place is all based around what makes people happy-- well, he can think of a few people that he would beat up with genuine joy.

"What do you want," Will says flatly, but he stands aside to let Derek in.

"Such good manners," Derek comments as he strolls inside. "Bet your mom would be proud."

Will doesn't reply, just shuts the door and walks around Derek into his kitchen. There's a bowl of frosted wheat on the counter, which seems a little puritanical, but also very on-brand. "So I've been thinking about how we're not soulmates," Derek announces.

"You're still on this shit?" Will scoffs, settling down onto one of his kitchen stools. They're the asymmetrical kind with the seats that look like one big slice of tree trunk. Derek likes them. "I figured you'd have a bunch more feelings in between yesterday and now and they'd distract you."

Derek pulls himself to sit on Will's counter, noting with pleasure how easily his shoulders and arms respond, and how huffy Will looks at the familiarity. "Okay, but I had a breakthrough," he says.

"You realized that I'm right and that it makes much more sense that you're a stubborn asshole who's determined not to like me, as opposed to our setup being the one single factor of this whole place that's not absolutely perfect?"

Will has a cowlick that Derek didn't notice yesterday.

That's two factors, Derek thinks.

"No," he says, with the patience of the completely right. "Well, sort of. You are right in that it seems a little narcissistic to think that we're the one problematic part of literal heaven, but you're wrong because-- drumroll please--"

Will just glares at him, spoon dangling in the cereal bowl, so Derek raps the counter himself. "We're not the only ones!"

The morning light here is really nice, coming through the trees outside the window in rough polygons like the holes in paper snowflakes. Derek appreciates it as Will chews his bite of cereal.

"What the fuck are you talking about, Nurse?" Will asks finally.

"Flying yesterday," Derek starts, letting himself bask in the feeling of having the upper hand. Will's not his real soulmate, no one can deny that now, so he doesn't have to be on his best behavior. "You saw Justin, right?"

"Yeah," Will says curtly. "He was anxious. That doesn't mean he broke heaven. People get anxious all the time."

"Sure they do, you don't have to tell me that. But then what happened?"

Will blinks. _You’re getting it_ , Derek thinks. "Adam."

"Yes, Adam. Who he met yesterday, in an event straight out a harlequin romance, which we both witnessed. And--" he holds up a finger as Will starts to interrupt him "-- I'm not asking you to believe that Justin and Adam are each other's soulmates, but you have to admit that they seem to complete each other better than they complete Chris or L."

"Good, because I don't believe that," Will snaps. "But-- fine."

"Fine?" Derek says hopefully.

"Yeah, fine, they seem obsessed. And if you're right--"

Derek pumps the air, and Will gives him the stink eye. " _If_ you're right, then a systematic issue makes more sense than one that's just us."

"A-ha!" Derek jumps off the counter, bows flamboyantly to his left and right. "Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all--"

"So now we go to Jack," Will says.

Derek freezes with his face toward his shins. "What?"

"You have a theory, and it's at least moderately plausible now, but we can't move forward until we know more. About how this whole system works, about who's in charge of quality control, about how a mismatch might happen in the first place-- we go talk to Jack."

For a crazy person, he has such a reasonable tone of voice.

Sighing, Derek straightens up. "So, what, we just go to Jack's office and tell him, an all-powerful inhuman deity, that we think he fucked up his calculations?"

Will shrugs and leans across the counter to put his cereal bowl in the sink. "You said it yourself. He's not actually a person, so he can't get offended. Plus he said we could ask him any questions we had. If you're wrong, which you almost certainly are, he can at least explain what's going on."

"I think he said we could ask Bittle what's going on," Derek says, desperately trying to press the brakes on this whole conversation. What happened to his upper hand?

"Fine," Will says coolly. "Excuse me, Bittle?"

"Hi!" Bittle says as he displaces the air just behind Derek.

" _Shit_ ," Derek says involuntarily, but they both ignore him.

A cheshire-cat grin stretches across Will's face as he speaks. "Bittle, what do we do if we think we have the wrong soulmate?"

Derek could swear the O.S. goes a bit pale. "You'll have to ask Jack about that," he says quickly, raising one hand into the air.

"Wait!" Derek calls, but in the same moment Bittle snaps his fingers and they all click out of the room.


	4. why do bad things always happen to mediocre people

Knight, Brandt Grahame: _Born Cambridge, MA. Educated Philips Andover, Harvard, Harvard. Spent most of adult life compensating for the above. Civil rights cases include Campbell v. Tulsa, Phuoc v. Tempeh, and Ximinez v. Baton Rouge. See page 9 for list of testimonies before Supreme Court. Points deducted for talking over coworkers and that time he tried to get a cat high._

* * *

 Despite Jack's kind, unfairly blue eyes, Will still feels like he's in the principal's office. The enormous wooden desk between them looks too big, like he's a kid in front of a grownup-sized piece of furniture. But he swallows it down. He's bluffed this far, and he refuses to give Derek the satisfaction of knowing that Will is just as lost as he is.

“Just to reiterate,” Jack says. “We painstakingly selected not only three hundred and twenty compatible people, capable of getting along well forever, but also one hundred and seventy one pairs among those people who are as close as you can get to a perfect match, using a system so complex that living humans can’t safely process it, and the results aren’t working out for you?”

His elbows-- still suit-jacketed, gray this time-- rest heavily on the edge of the aforementioned desk, and his fingers are steepled in front of his face in a way that says somebody's in trouble. Maybe Jack, maybe Will and Derek. It's unclear.

"Well, that's what Derek thinks," Will says, ignoring the offended snort on his left. He shifts in his armchair, the square kind that you see in a guidance counselor's office when they're trying to trick you into being comfortable. "I'm not saying I'm sold, but I figured we might want to ask more about how the whole soulmate thing works before we make any rash decisions."

Jack sighs. He's not supposed to sigh. He's supposed to laugh this off. Will feels panicky.

"Okay, then Derek. What makes you think you have the wrong soulmate?"

"Well, for one, we hated each other on sight, which sounds harsh but I think Will would agree with me--" Will nods "-- and I doubt that's normal. And I just-- I know. I know I'm a human with limited experience, but I'm sure I know what soulmates look like. I’ve seen them."

Derek looks down into his lap, and with a sting that surprises him, Will thinks: oh. Maybe he didn't just want anybody besides Will. Maybe it was _some_ body _._ Someone specific.

Jack, meanwhile, is taking off his suit jacket and undoing his cuffs, and Will would be a little afraid if Jack didn't look so tired. He looks naked. "I don't have your file right here, Derek, but I cannot tell you you’re wrong."

"It's not just that," Will blurts, feeling like he's tipped over a pitcher of water that's still pouring out, and it might as well empty completely. "We might not be the only ones."

This seems to surprise Jack much less than it surprised Will. He leans back in his worn leather office chair, huffs out a breath that moves his perfect hair just a little. "Okay. What makes you think that?"

"Adam and Justin," Derek replies. "The guys--"

"No, I know them," Jack interjects brusquely. He closes his eyes.

The room is absolutely silent for a few beats. Will starts to wonder if that means they're dismissed. He makes eye contact with Derek, whose face is criss-crossed by the shadows of the leaded glass in Jack's window, and Derek shrugs at him, green eyes wide as dinner plates. But when Will starts to move out of his chair, Jack sits up, and he falls back.

"Can I tell you something in confidence?" Jack asks.

No, _no_ , this isn't supposed to be something an eternal deity asks for, but Will sees Derek nod enthusiastically out of the corner of his eye. "Well," Jack says, and Will has the nauseating thought that he's going to regret knowing this. "This neighborhood has some-- abnormalities."

"What's wrong with it?" Derek asks, and Will turns to glare at him. If he thinks hard enough, he might be able to project the voice screaming _SHUT UUUUUUP_ inside his head into Derek's.

Jack crosses over to the office door and locks the deadbolt before continuing. "We don't know. It's-- we're having trouble accessing some of the information that all neighborhoods and architects should have at their disposal. We keep finding little slip-ups in different corners in the neighborhood where things don't fit together right. Nothing serious or threatening, just-- small programming mistakes."

"No offense, sir,” Will says,”but that seems like a normal part of any new system starting up. Especially one this complicated.” If you could throw up in heaven, he might.

Jack finally looks at him with a little condescension, which is reassuring. "Not on this plane, William Poindexter. Architects, like me, are eternal beings with access to infinite knowledge and infinite resources to create these neighborhoods. It's not normal for things to go wrong. What's more, I can't troubleshoot the way I'd like to because--" he sighs, rubs his temples in a convincing pantomime of a human headache.

Will looks over at Derek. Not for reassurance, exactly, but just because the only thing that he can think is _Is anybody else seeing this shit?_

Derek nods at him, and Will wants to cry. He feels like he's sinking down into his chair and then into the floor and then into the confusing soup of the cold, uncaring universe. He wants to make a blanket nest in a bathtub and sleep forever.

"See," Jack says, sensing that both of them are lost. "Take the soulmate pairings, like you asked about. That's an incredibly complex program. To find a soulmate for each of you, we run all the data we have on you-- which is all of it, ever-- through all the data we have about every other person who has ever lived, accounting for whether or not those other people have other, better pairings within the network, and keeping in mind that sometimes soulmates come in larger sets-- as far as you're capable of understanding, the system pairs people based on infinite factors."

Will sits up. The room seems a little brighter. The dark, all-consuming waters of the chaotic universe recede.

"And it has never not worked before," Jack continues. "It always, _always--_ "

"Like an algorithm," Will interrupts, finding the handhold he'd been scrabbling for since yesterday.

Jack nods, slowly at first, head tilted in consideration. "That’s roughly correct, yes,” he says.

"I can do algorithms," Will says, self-assurance rushing desperately back. "Let me help."

 

* * *

 

"What the fuck, man," Derek hisses as they spill out of Jack's office and onto the sunlit pavement. He grabs Will by the wrist. "You can't just offer to help Hot God with his I.T. problems."

Will snaps around to face him, and he's nearly unrecognizable. He looks delighted, but also on fire, the way Derek remembers saints being described during the mass at his Catholic middle school. He claps a hand over Derek's fingers. "I don't think you understand," he says carefully, "exactly how good I am at this."

Sure, Derek thinks, and lets Will drag him back towards their street by the wrist.

  


There are two parts to this, as far as Derek understands. One, Jack had said, he'd give Will an interface. Or access to the interface, or something. Just a way to look right into the guts of the neighborhood, technologically speaking. Two, Jack would hunt down all the things that might be going wrong in the neighborhood, so he and Will could know where to start looking.

Derek supposes that Bittle appearing without warning in his bathroom is a phase of part two.

"Jesus, man, let a guy have some dignity," Derek says, more high-pitched than he would have liked.

Bittle smiles patiently as Derek fumbles for the towel rack. "Again, I'm an operating system, so human nudity means nothing to me whatsoever. Though, if it makes you less embarrassed, I can change into a different form."

There's that chirpy update noise again, and suddenly there's a cat with apricot fur and enormous brown eyes perching on Derek's counter. _Bloop_ . A marigold parrot. _Bloop_. A two-foot Mrs. Claus in a red velvet ski suit. She speaks with Bittle's voice: "I'm here on Jack's behalf to invite you--"

"That's way worse," Derek says, and Bittle pops back to his original shape without skipping a beat.

"--to a completely confidential meeting for those who are having trouble adjusting to their soulmate arrangement. If you have concerns or questions about the soulmate process or your pairing specifically, you're welcome to come and discuss the matter at four o'clock this afternoon in the Toasty Bean. Remember, it's perfectly natural to have some trouble adjusting to the afterlife. Good afternoon."

He disappears with a wink. Derek sits down heavily on his laundry basket. So this is really happening, he thinks.

 

"Come in," Will calls from deep inside his house.

When he glances up, unfolding himself from whatever he's hunched over, to see Derek standing in the doorway, he scowls. "What do you want?"

Derek smiles breezily. "Meeting starts in fifteen minutes, I Love Lucy, let's go!"

"That's not as accurate as you think it is," Will says grumpily. He checks the time on the stove, sighs, stands up. Derek can see a beige plastic tablet on the counter, thick as a biology textbook.

"Kinda retro for top-of-the-line heaven technology," he says, pointing.

Will snorts and nods. "Technically, it's just an access port. I'm pretty sure they don’t usually use these up here, and Jack had to summon one for me, and he tried to pick something that I'd be comfortable with. He's just about thirty years behind human tech aesthetics."

Derek pictures Jack's Oxford-esque office and nods. "Yeah, makes sense."

Will rolls his shoulders before pulling his flannel back on, and Derek does not pay attention to the muscles shifting around below his white undershirt. "Okay, let's go," he says, clapping once that way that white dads do when they leave a restaurant. Derek wonders suddenly how old Will was when he died-- but he supposes that's one of those things you're not supposed to ask in heaven. Like, "what are you in for?"

The walk to the coffeeshop is short and quiet and blessedly devoid of neighbors; it seems like good people are good enough not to pry about other people's personal lives. He wants to ask about the program, but trying not to talk to Will actually seems to be making their relationship more successful.

And he's starting to feel exhausted again, the way he used to, just knowing that heaven is officially on the fritz. He'd thought it was finally over. But everything's uphill, even here.

"You seem a lot more at peace with the idea that we're not soulmates now that you know we have company," he says finally.

Will shoots a glance over at him. "I'm not a terrible person who delights in the suffering of other people," he replies. "It's just."

"You feel better when you can stay busy?"

It's quiet again for a second. The cobblestones pass under their feet smoothly in a way that they never really did on earth. Derek knows from twenty years in various historical college towns that it's hard to keep your balance on pavement somebody installed before the revolutionary war. And he’d never had the best balance, even before.

"Well, if paradise is broken, it can be fixed," Will says. "That's the general principle of broken systems."

"But people aren't like that," Derek says. "If it was just the two of us screwing everything up, that's different?"

Will doesn't reply.

They round the corner to see two brown-haired people entering the side door to the coffeeshop. A man and a woman, it looks like, with the exact same haircut. He ushers Will in after them, half out of petty politeness and half because he’s afraid to see what they'll find inside. He's not proud.

The shop is close and low-lit. It smells perfectly like a cafe: coffee on top, overwhelmingly, and then pastry dough, and then a clean edge of dust. There's a wide slice of afternoon light coming in under the drapes, but a mismatched set of kerosene-yellow lamps are lit as well, scattered over the equally mismatched tables. Derek wonders if the shades are always down like that or if Jack and Bittle, standing in the center of the room near a circle of chairs, had pulled them down on purpose. They'd said there was nothing to be ashamed of, but their messaging seems a little conflicted.

He turns toward the refreshments spread out on one of the larger tables, avoiding temporarily the actual meeting part of this meeting. The brunette people are in line directly in front of him. They're arguing about something political and truly unintelligible, even to Derek, who thought of himself as a conscientious citizen and had never missed a voting day in his life. He's pretty sure they're reciting sixteen-character bill names off the top of their heads.

Come to think of it, they might not be fighting at all. They might just be agreeing vehemently. He can't decipher enough of what they're saying to figure it out.

When he wends his way back to the circle with a drink in each hand, he's surprised to see that Will saved a seat next to him.

"Black coffee?" Derek asks as he slides into his chair. "It seemed like a safe choice."

Will looks over, eyebrows high, and accepts the cup. "Thanks."

Everyone finally settles: Jack, Bittle, and a handful of other couples, half of whom Derek recognizes. Sure enough, Justin and Chris and L and Adam are there, and then the brunettes, and another woman he's seen in passing. In the seats nearest Jack and Bitty, there's a pair of women-- one blonde, one black-haired, both sporting high ponytails and big resin earrings. They cross their legs toward each other simultaneously as Jack begins to speak.

"Thank you all for coming," he says, shoving his hands in his pockets in a way that reminds Derek of a Hugh Grant character. "I understand that this might be difficult for you. I suppose perfect is a pretty high standard to keep up."

He gives a self-deprecating chuckle, and the crowd laughs quietly with him. "Now, we don't have a perfectly clear picture about what, exactly, is going on here quite yet. However, I want to be honest with you: it's possible that some of the humans in this neighborhood have been paired with the wrong soulmates."

Though it's barely visible in the low light, Will twitches. Derek glances at him, concerned, and sees that they're not the only ones reacting. Some people look sad, some unsurprised, but actually none look taken completely aback. Jack’s gaze drops to the ground in a near-human show of shame, and Derek sees Bittle raise a hand to pat his back.

The dark-haired woman next to them pipes up in a reassuring tone. "But a soulmate pairing may not be easy right away. Even the most compatible relationships can take time to develop." Derek is pretty sure she's human.

Jack nods at her. "Yes, thank you, Mandy. Again, this is likely only the case for those of you in here. I don't want to alarm anyone unnecessarily; I just want to be as clear as possible. I’ve already spoken to everyone who had concerns, and Mandy and Jenny were kind enough to meet with those who just needed some help adjusting to having a soulmate. Though those of you here almost certainly have been paired with the wrong person, I encourage you to meet with these two if you have any other concerns. They were highly respected relationship counselors on earth.”

"This process would be emotionally trying for anyone," Jenny adds. "There's no bad reason to meet with a counselor."

"So," Jack says. "Ask as many questions as you need, and when you’re done, join myself and Bittle in those corner booths."

 

* * *

 

There are eleven of them total: L, Justin, Adam, Chris, the two brunettes-- Caitlin and a guy who insisted on being called Shitty, Derek, himself, and then George.

George had spawned totally alone: the blue-doored cottage at the end of Will’s block belonged to her, and the red-doored one to her soulmate, who had never arrived. She was an amiable, confident woman with gold hoops in her ears, and she didn't seem all that bothered about not having a soulmate on the surface. Still, Will imagined stepping out of his house every morning and seeing the empty space where the love of his life was supposed to be. It couldn’t have felt great.

And now they were all staring at him because Jack had said he was taking a look at the neighborhood's programming. Which meant that he was an expert on everything now, apparently.

"Yo, that's crazy," Shitty says. "That must be complicated as fuck."

"For real," Justin adds.

Will shifts uncomfortably. "I mean, it's what I did back in the day," he replies, and now he's talking like his own grandfather. Back in the day?

The general gaze of the conversation turns back to Jack and Bittle. Jack carefully explains that they're not trying to match-make or anything, they're just trying to kick the system back into order first, but he'll keep them all in the loop.

Will zones out, begins scrolling through his tablet. The system is just so _big._ It’s like trying to map the ocean through a submarine porthole.

"Hey," Derek says, and elbows him in the ribs.

"What are you, five?" Will snaps, swatting his hand away.

Derek lifts his hands in surrender. "Dude, chill. I just need to get out of the booth. Plus it was super rude the way you ignored everybody like that."

"Fuck off," Will says, but looking around, he realizes Derek is right. He’d gotten so absorbed in the task that he hadn’t even noticed everyone else taking off.

“You gonna be able to handle this, man?” Derek asks, likely clocking the resigned look on Will’s face.

He snorts. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. So far, I can’t figure out how everything is organized, I can’t find any information on any of us, and I’ve only been able to conclusively decide that there’s no user manual! This is going fucking fabulous!”

“Relax,” Derek urges as he slides gracefully off the bench. “Everyone’s really excited to help.”

On their way out of the coffeeshop, in fact, George stops him to say as much. "Hey, Poindexter!" she calls, then jogs across the cobblestones towards him and Derek. "I just wanted to say on behalf of everyone that we want to help. No pressure or anything, take your time doing your work, but if there's any way that we can contribute, I think we all feel better about doing that than sitting around on our asses."

Will definitely likes her. "Yeah, thanks, uh. I don't really know what I'm dealing with just yet, but I'll let you know."

She nods and runs back to join the clump of jocks still standing on the corner.

He mostly expected Derek to stay back and talk to the others. Like almost everyone Will meets, he's better with people than Will is, and he might as well bond with the other people who seem totally fine with not having a soulmate. They can go be emotionally well-adjusted together. "You following me home now, too?" he asks aloud.

Derek scoffs. "We live on the same block, idiot. You don't have to act like I'm some kind of tumor you want to cut out."

He didn't mean it like that, or at least he mostly didn't, but he's suddenly desperate to be by himself. "I told George I'd let you guys know when I have a way you can help," Will snaps, feeling like a reactive kid. "That includes you. I can’t really think of a way for you to be useful, so maybe you can stay back and make, like, any other friends."

That does it, apparently. Derek laughs sharply and turns his back. "Yeah, I better," he says, and then Will can hear him walk away purposefully.

The street is quiet, but busier than it was earlier. It's the long end of dusk, and Will watches the purple shadows behind his legs cut through the weak gold scraps of sunset. He's mature enough to admit that there's a part of him, still, that feels wounded by Derek's absolute certainty that they're not soulmates. It's just garden-variety insecurity, like he always had, but it's disconcerting that it's happening in heaven.

The sooner, the better, he thinks to himself as he finally turns in through his front door. When he figures out what's wrong, when he fixes everything, then he can put all this behind him. Derek can be some guy that annoys him next door, instead of the arbiter of whether Will's worth anything as a person. Who knows? Maybe he'll even get to move away.

"Okay, he says to his empty living room as he settles on the couch with the tablet. "Okay, let's do this."


	5. i do not have a cactus

Chow, Christopher V: _Born San Jose, CA. Educated University of Michigan. Career goalie for Boston Bruins. Noted supporter of NWHL, progressive sports culture campaigns, and mental healthcare standards for youth athletes. Adopted and cared for over 70 senior dogs. Once saw Derek Nurse's TED talk and thought it was good. Earned over a dozen point losses via forgetting to bring his sleep apnea mask on roadies._

* * *

 

Will wakes up on his couch, bewildered and with a bad taste in his mouth. Little things like that still exist in heaven-- morning breath, post-sleep grogginess-- because people love the way it feels to come out of a deep sleep and to brush your teeth, according to Jack. Little solvable symptoms of being alive. "Excuse me, Bittle?" he calls to the living room that's still not quite in focus. "Can I get another box of cereal?"

The system here is hellish, to say the least. He’s been hunched over the tablet for at least four hours straight when he giggles at that particular turn of phrase.

In every project Will has ever taken on, no matter how impossible it seems from the trailhead, he has seen a first step. Some kind of toehold, a gap to wedge himself into to begin taking the problem apart. And now he's mixing a fourth metaphor into his mental narration, which means he's spending far too much time around Derek.

He can't make heads or tails of Jack's system, which makes sense given that it's invented to manage the eternal lives and happiness of several hundred people, down to the last faultless detail. But there are so many factors he doesn't understand-- programs that don't seem to lead anywhere, elements of their neighborhood that he can't find at all. It seems nigh-impossible to relate any of the information that he's seeing to any of the concrete objects around him. It's like trying to make two five-thousand piece puzzles at the same time. Where's he, for instance? Where's the file that deals with Jack? Where's the file for the stupid nymph statue in Derek's front yard?

He does everything he can to get his brain moving. He takes a long shower, paces, walks out to the beach. He collects a pile of flat stones and skips them all unsuccessfully. He finds a button on the tablet that makes it fold in, to roughly the size of a Palm Pilot, and out, to something akin to an LED whiteboard on wheels."Goddammit," he says aloud to his empty living room, but that's unsatisfying, so he calls out, "Excuse me, Bittle?" and when Bittle obligingly appears, Will simply says "goddammit" to him and dismisses him again.

Around the fifth or sixth time he sees a reference to a some oversized file named TONY, which Bittle says is not the name of any of the neighborhood residents, Will throws the tablet down onto the couch. He's finished his frosted wheat again, he's wearing glasses that his 20/20 heaven vision doesn't technically need because they make him feel more focused, and he feels the phantom echo of that back pain he used to get right in between his shoulder blades.

He's going to need to talk to Derek again. And it's going to suck.

Sure enough, when he knocks on the front door of the townhouse, Derek's voice comes from somewhere near the kitchen: "What do you want, asshole?"

He tries to wait Derek out in silence, but gives up after five minutes. "I need your help," he says as loudly as he can force himself to.

That gets the door open. Derek leans into the six-inch gap between the door and the doorframe with a blank look. "You finally came back to talk to the brains of the operation?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. I was an asshole," Will says. "I said I'd let you know when I need your help. So, I'm letting you know."

He's trying to avoid eye contact, but Derek won't let him. "Look, dickspoon," Derek says finally, opening the door just slightly farther. "I don't fight you on things because it's fucking fun for me, all right? I'm trying to help, because I want you to be able to fix this, but I don't have to go toe to toe with you all the time just because you're stubborn. And if you keep being an asshole, I'll pack it right in and stay in my house."

 

* * *

 

Derek can't say it's not satisfying to see Bitchass Weasley on his front stoop eating crow.

"If you actually want my help with this, you're going to have to be the nice one, all right? You're going to make a token effort not to go off at every single thing I say. And you're going to say, in front of at least three people-- Jack and Bittle do not count, because I know you have some weird ability to keep the fact that they're not human in mind all the time," he steps closer to Will, forcing eye contact, "that I am the brains of the operation. Those words exactly. And in a way that doesn't sound like you lost a bet. I want that shit to sound natural."

Will plops down on one of Derek's kitchen chairs and huffs. "So happy we could be grownups about this."

"I'm a petty bitch," Derek calls as he rummages in the pantry for a bag of quinoa chips. He drops it on the table in front of Will, then dives back into the fridge for hummus. "Kind of a relief I can take it out on you and preserve my image as a good heaven citizen around everybody else."

Heaven doesn't have analog clocks in most places, but Derek likes the way they look and sound, the way they give away the fact that they're doing their job, so one hangs on the far wall of the kitchen. It ticks placidly into the silence as he watches Will with crossed arms.

"What," Will says, finally.

"You look like shit," Derek says. He sits down and overloads a chip with hummus, not bothering to chew and swallow all the way before he continues. "What's happening with the iPearly Gates?"

If you could strain the muscles that roll your eyes, Will would need physical therapy. "I just need you to interview people," he says, glancing between Derek's second pita chip and his eyes.

The next ten are silent beside the loud sounds of chewing. Derek pushes the open end of the chip bag toward Will. "Why?"

"I just need to know birthplaces, jobs, basic stuff like that," Will says, not taking a chip.

"Why?" Derek asks stubbornly, pushing it closer.

"It's complicated," Will says.

Derek drums his fingertips on his kitchen table. "I'm smart. Try me."

"Fine," Will says, pulling a chip from the bag and eating it dry. Derek cringes and pushes the hummus closer. "The whole system is full of huge amounts of data, like several orders of magnitude more than all of the information on the human internet, and it's basically impossible to navigate without better search terms. The data is kind of loosely organized into packets, but they're unlabeled, and I need to find the ones that pertain to each of us-- if that's even how they're organized-- to see if they've gotten cross-contaminated or something. And to find the actual soulmate program, because that's still in hiding somewhere."

He has surprisingly graceful hands, and he gestures a lot as he explains. Derek is still watching them when they finally grab a chip, dip it in hummus and shove it into Will's mouth, which he looks away from quickly.

"Was that so hard?" he asks, with pretend confidence.

"Yeah it was!" Will replies, pitch spiking. "Have you ever tried to-- I don't know-- explain the Odyssey to a guy who only reads Reddit?"

He's turning red again, and he busies himself with the chips.

Derek suppresses a laugh. "First of all, I resent that comparison. Second of all, I was into post-industrial transnational poetry, not classics. And third, I taught freshman comp for three years, so I do know exactly what that's like, and I did fine."

Will glares at him across the table. Derek wonders if his ears get red before his face does, or if it kind of starts in his cheeks and spreads outward.

"Okay," Derek says. "Who do I need to talk to?"

 

The rest of the soulmate problem kids-- Chris calls them "team," while Adam makes a _Breakfast Club_ reference-- are more than happy to meet up. Derek tells them that they don't really all need to be there at once, but they all show up to the café at the same time anyway. In Shitty's words, "I just wanna hang out, brahs."

In one corner, Will sets up shop with his Windows '99 iPad; in another, Derek lines up a yellow legal pad and a cup of pens. ("You can't just go digital?" Will had sighed, which had been enough to make Derek commit even harder to handwriting.) Across the room, Jack and Bittle have set up shop in a plushy booth that seems totally at odds with both of their perfect robot posture.

Unsurprisingly, Shitty loves to talk about himself, so he slides into the seat across from Derek first. "What up?" he drawls, and Derek laughs and writes "Boston" under hometown.

Between Will and himself, they'd produced a decent questionnaire for everybody that gathered the maximum number of keywords and proper nouns without really prying. In Shitty's case, it seems like prying wouldn't have been a problem in the first place; he’s a font of information. Derek bites his lip to keep from asking about the details of all the human rights cases that he worked on and focuses on gathering searchable things instead. Years, places, names. It turns out that he’s the owner of the ramshackle victorian house down the street, which is fun. They only hit a bump when Derek asks about his legal name.

Shitty reaches across the table like a snake lashing out to bite, and he grabs Derek's collar.

"This doesn't leave this booth," he hisses, nose nearly touching Derek's.

Derek blinks. "I mean, it technically has to, but nobody will see it except Will."

Shitty glances toward Will's corner, squints. "Fine, but if I ever hear that you or discount Conan even _breathe_ with the intention of sharing this information I will teleport across the neighborhood and kill. You. Dead." He punctuates each last word with a jab to Derek's sternum.

Caitlin, Shitty's soulmate, slides in next. The foundation of their relationship seems to be competitive. When Derek mentions that Shitty was an open book, she responds with "I once yelled Ruth Bader Ginsburg's name in bed."

Derek fights his fit of laughter for a solid two seconds, but when he loses it, Caitlin doesn't look offended.

Then, when Sunshine Chris walks up to take her place, Derek watches her eyes widen, narrow, and then travel slowly up and down his frame.

 _Same_ , Derek thinks.

 

* * *

 

 

Will is as gay and emotionally constipated as they come, but if he’d been born in a time when one needed a beard, he would have proposed to Georgia Martin.

"Wait, wait, wait," he calls to Derek, who's walking back to his booth. "What the hell is this number?”

Derek retreats to Will’s table to look where he’s pointing.

Will squints at him, then the paper, then back at Derek.

"That’s a three," Derek says. “She won the NCAA women’s hockey championships three times with the University of Minnesota.”

“Shit,” he says.

“I know,” Derek replies.

He peers over at Will’s own notes and laughs. “You’re giving me shit about my handwriting and then yours looks like _this_? The fuck is TONY?”

“The other guy ruining my life,” Will says mildly. “I’ll figure that out sooner or later.”

Derek laughs, and Will kind of wishes he wouldn’t. They're in this weird middle place, as he imagines all of the others are: in waiting for somebody perfect, but stuck together for now. Like getting locked in a utility closet with the caterer at your own wedding. Circumstances demand that you get along, but also that you don't get along too well, not that that part should be a problem, except you can't picture your fiancé's face and the caterer is really cute, and the closet didn't seem that small initially but it's getting smaller and smaller and--

He shakes his head and sets George's profile to the side. Derek's doing a good job with this, a fact he’s sort of surprised by, but then again Will’s older sister Caroline was a historian. He’s seen what a humanities major can do with keywords.

A couple of booths away, Jack and Bittle have been anxiously watching the proceedings. When Jack sees Derek walk away, he strides over. "Can I sit?"

Will, intimidated as he still is by the sheer Greek God of him, waves wordlessly at the seat across from him. "Can I ask you something?" he says, then wants to kick himself.

"Sure," Jack says, unbuttoning his suit jacket as he sits down, like a BBC actor in an interview. "Do you need to know something else about the system?"

"Uh, no, I mean, I have a lot of questions about that--" Will fights the urge to smack his head into the tabletop. Not that it would hurt. "But I, uh. That's not your, like, real form? Right?"

He motions to Jack's general torso and face area. Jack looks mildly surprised, then tilts his head in thought. "No, I suppose not. I exist in several dimensions that you don't, so I picked something humans could process. Why do you ask?"

Oh, god. Will just opens and closes his mouth a few times before shrugging.. "I just-- I wondered where the whole... look came from."

Jack furrows his brow at Will, then at the table. "I think some architects choose a preexisting human form, a face and body that existed on earth at some point or other, so I may have done that, but I don't remember."

Will realizes that all of the rest of his questions he can think of are related to the ethics of sex robots, and his mouth snaps shut.

Jack looks curiously at him for a second, then reverts back to blank professionalism. "Well, I wanted to see if you had any updates on your work. You think the files for the town were mislabeled?"

"Uh, yeah, maybe," Will says. "There's a lot of kind of-- loose data floating around; it seemed like a place to start. Unless, I mean, that might be normal for the Good Place's software?"

Fiddling with a sugar packet, Jack shakes his head no. "No, that doesn't seem right. Certainly start there, and just, eh, keep me updated." He taps the table awkwardly with his fist and stands up.

Will just catches Bittle turning to face the other way, like he'd been caught eavesdropping. When Jack reaches the booth they've been sharing again, the O.S. looks up with fake surprise and smiles at him, says something inaudible.

The back of Bittle’s neck looks kind of pink.

 

"Take a break?" Derek asks, dropping another yellow slip onto the dented oak table next to Will.

"I shouldn't until we're done," he replies tersely, glancing over Justin's information-- there’s a list of names from what looks like sixty relatives, which will be helpful.

"First of all, you wanna make sure that stick doesn’t fully disappear into your ass, and second of all, we _are_ done."

Will looks around the cafe for the first time in several hours. Sure enough, he's got the search terms for everyone except Derek. And himself, he supposes. The rest of the team is piled into a booth that's too small for them, probably willfully ignorant of the much-larger booth two feet away. George is settled primly in a chair at the end of the booth, but she's laughing along with the conversation as loudly as Shitty.

"Oh," he says. "I'd say tell everybody they can go home, but they seem like they're having a good time."

"They are," Derek replies. "They're also fun to be around, and they asked if you wanted to go to the sports bar next door. So. Take a break?"

The conversation coming from the booth is plenty loud enough to hear, but not there's too much crosstalk and cackling to really decipher any meaning. Will watches them for a second as they shift half onto each other's laps and shoot straw wrappers across the table, and then Adam is waving with a "Yo, Nurse!" that shakes the foundations of the cafe. "Are you gonna go?" Will asks.

He shrugs. "Well, yeah, dude, it's not like I have an opening shift tomorrow or something."

Derek is already looking back toward the booth, and, unbidden, Will pictures a vague eighth person in the booth with them, someone with a septum piercing and good ideas about Walt Whitman. The soulmate Derek remembers from being alive. "No," Will says, too forcefully, and busies himself with typing in Justin's profile. "No, I should really keep working on this."

"You're really raring to get this whole situation cleaned up, huh?" Derek says, with something in his voice that Will isn't going to try to identify.

He scoffs instead. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Though Will refuses to look up, he can sense Derek hovering at his side for another couple of seconds. Then L yells for him to hurry up, and he mutters "your loss, dude," and is gone.

 

* * *

 

 

Jack really wasn't fucking around when he said the neighborhood was chosen for each other. Derek has known these people ("call us the team!" Chris insists. "Make it a thing!") for less than a day and he's already ready to stand between them and a runaway train. It's like a camp friendship, forged in the crucible of constant togetherness and leisure activities. Although the Good Place isn't quite the crafts cabin that Derek remembers from childhood. "Fucking shit fuck beaut of a man," Shitty yells at the 50's college football game on TV.

Bittle, or some branch of him-- it seems like he can be in a million places at one-- is training L behind the bar, and he's shockingly competent. Derek tries to remember if he's seen Bittle actually make any of the drinks that he's had since getting here. He could swear they've always just popped up in the guy's hands out of nowhere, but here he is teaching Ellie to pour a tequila shot behind her own back like a seasoned Vegas bartender. "How are you fucking doing this?" L exclaims as she sprays liquor all the way down her tank top.

Bittle laughs. "Well, it's not so different from baking."

"What, you know how to bake?" Derek asks, swirling a straw through his cosmo.

For a second or two, Bittle just stares at him, mouth slightly open, as if Derek just asked him something in Klingon. "I know how to do everything," he finally says, then begins dabbing Ellie's back with a washcloth.

Right. Derek always did this with technology. A girlfriend he'd had in his twenties used to make fun of him for saying "thank you" to the Alexa.

He tips his glass to both of them and wanders to the air hockey table, where Chris is systematically destroying Adam. It's actually a little unsettling to see Chris in competition mode; he doesn't even glance over when Shitty yells again.

Derek says as much to Adam, who widens his eyes in agreement. "I haven't seen him laugh or smile in at least five minutes," he says out of the corner of his mouth. "That's five minutes longer than usual."

Leaning around from Adam's other side, Justin nods meaningfully at Derek. "Chyeah. And he's impossible to get past, even though Holtzy can usually fucking crush people." There's no point asking how Justin knows that, or where the nickname came from.

Derek takes a faux-casual sip of his drink as he remembers what Chris used to do for a living. Better to let the boys run themselves into a wall.

Chris rockets the game-ending shot into goal. “I’m good at shit,” he says affably, and he touches his nose as he makes eye contact with Derek.

Farmer cackles loudly from her barstool.

Shitty finally tunes in as his game ends, sidling up to the table. "Speaking of, man, what's up with Dennis the Computer Menace? Like, what's the sitch with the whole--" he gestures vaguely.

"Yeah, actually," Chris chimes in. "I majored in CompSci in college and I have no fucking idea what's going on."

Derek looks back and forth between them and shrugs. "I mean. I don't actually know anything. Will's not exactly an effusive dude. And he kind of hates me."

"No he doesn't," L calls from behind the bar. Derek's unsure what to make of that, and he thinks he might be turning red, so he buries his face in his martini glass.

“Well, we’re stuck here,” Shitty says. “You’ll figure him out eventually.”

 _Not if I don’t have to,_ Derek thinks.


	6. patient and kind and surprisingly jacked

Birkholtz, Adam L:  _Born Buffalo, NY, educated Columbia University. Healthcare economist, consultant on structure for universal American healthcare system, and advocate for expansion of social welfare programs. Legal guardian of cousin Anja from age 16 after parents proved themselves unfit. Once slept with March Andrews and does remember it, but will not cause neighborhood tension. Likes musicals and lost a significant number of points for humming the Music Man soundtrack to himself on the subway._

* * *

 

Derek breathes deeply, takes account of the way his body feels, starting from the crown of his head. Hangovers aren't real here: no headache, no nausea, but his breath is definitely heinous, so he's still brushing his teeth as he lies in goddess pose on his dining room floor. This feels pleasantly normal. He's not any more flexible than he used to be on earth, but his body doesn't protest as much when he tries to release his hip flexors.

He's having a nice goddamn morning, and so of course someone knocks on the door like it had insulted them personally. _Three guesses who that is_ , Derek thinks, and calls "Come in!"

Or tries to. As soon as he opens his windpipe to speak, the toothbrush falls further back into his mouth and hits his soft palate. He rolls onto his side, coughing up a lung and a little bit of toothpaste, only to make eye contact with a skeptical-looking Will Poindexter. "Good morning?" he says.

Derek holds up one finger in a "wait a second" motion. Stubbornly, Will follows while Derek walks to the kitchen sink, spits, and rinses his toothbrush.

"What do you need, Chef Linguini?" Derek says nonchalantly, turning his electric kettle on and starting to rummage through the cupboards.

Although Derek had never been a minimalist decorator, nearly every surface of his kitchen is white, and Will's fiery hair stands out like a flame on paper as he lingers awkwardly near the fridge. His eyes roll for, surprisingly, the first time today.

Derek tuts. "Aw, come on, you were doing so well pretending you could stand to be in the same room with me."

"You're just getting a little niche with the ginger references now, is all," Will says, shifting from one foot to the other. “And I need one of those information sheets about you."

The kettle goes off, and the boiling water hisses as it passes over Derek's tea infuser. "What do you want to know?"

"You know," Will replies, settling into one of Derek's kitchen stools. "Just the answers to same interview you gave everyone else yesterday. I can just type them all in here myself."

"At least buy me dinner first," Derek says with an edge of annoyance. Will sighs and looks up at him, somewhat like a cat who didn't ask to be cuddled.

Derek's tea is still hot enough to burn, but he pretends to take a sip just to make Will wait. "This isn't hard, dude. My full name is Derek Malik Nurse. What's yours?"

"I'll be able to figure out my own search terms, Derek," Will mumbles, typing the name in.

"Yeah, I know, but I also know literally nothing about you besides that you're a dick who works with computers, and we're going to live in the same neighborhood forever anyway, probably. Humor me. No offense, but I'd rather spend my Sunday--"

"There's no such thing as days of the week here," Will interrupts.

"My _Sunday morning_ having a semi-pleasant social interaction instead of a therapy session with a robot. I know it's a work in progress, but we are technically in paradise, so this really only has to suck if you decide to make it suck." He waves his mug in Will's general direction. "Full name."

"William John Poindexter," he mutters, swiping something around on his tablet. "The third."

Derek nods. "Wow, was it difficult dying of smallpox on the Mayflower?"

"Ha ha. Date of birth?"

"February fourteenth--"

" _ARE YOU SER-_ -"

 

* * *

 

Despite himself, Will doesn't hate sitting in Derek's sunwashed kitchen and getting gently mocked for the various details of his life. The air smells like mint tea and potting soil, and the spider plant tendrils spilling over the top of the cabinets sway in the breeze from the open screen door. "I'm just saying, there has to be a legal limit on the number of relatives in one family who can be named Sarah," Derek says.

"Whatever, private school," Will says mildly, toying with the brightness on his tablet. "Family names?"

Derek taps the outside of his mug. "Well, my mom was Imani Nurse, and my mama was Paloma Rodriguez, but she also took my mom's name when they got married. And my big sister's name is Fatima. I grew up with her and my moms, but my dad and my half-siblings were around a lot too-- Anthony Holt, and then Aisha, Kelan, and Eugene. We all lived on the same street when I was little. We did holidays together and stuff. There was a holiday at least once a month when I was growing up."

Will doesn't expect the catch in his voice, and he glances up involuntarily. Derek is gazing blankly in the direction of the sink, thumb rubbing the handle of his mug. "That sounds really nice," Will says hesitantly.

"It was."

Derek shakes off the absent look and glances back at Will, head tilted like a curious bird. “What was your family like?”

Blame his focus on the project, blame the smell of green in the air, blame the fact that he’s actually comfortable, but Will doesn’t even think to not be honest. “Well, they’re mostly raging homophobes I haven’t spoken to in twenty years. Except the odd sister or cousin,” he amends, and then falls silent when he hears Derek’s mug hit the counter a little sharply.

It's quiet, then, except for the sound of long grasses waving past each other in the backyard, and the barely-audible waves hitting the beach beyond Will's house.

"Okay, well," Will says, unsure what to say next. He flips through the note full of new details about Derek Nurse, the names of all his schools and his poetry collections and even of his ex-partners, who he'd asked about only briefly. Addresses he lived at, employers he'd had. "I should have enough to find you in here. But, uh, I still might need to ask you a couple of questions. Can I just--" He trails off.

"Go ahead and stay here while you work, man. Better than you holing yourself up in your goblin cottage."

“It’s a nice cottage, asshole,” Will says, relieved, and hunches back over the tablet.

"Although--" Derek starts. "I might be banging pots and pans around in here, if that's okay."

"Thought you said you couldn't cook?" Will asks, with a smile that’s about half as fond as it is smug.

Raising his eyebrows, Derek spins toward a cabinet that opens to reveal a shelf of cookbooks. "I certainly can't," he says. "But, excuse me, Bittle?"

Bittle appears between Derek and the open cabinet door, hands clasped in front of him. His face is inches away from Derek, and Will laughs brashly when Derek startles, slipping on his tile floor. "How can I help you?" Bittle asks cheerfully.

Derek smiles back at him. "I'm gonna need rice."

Although Bittle supposedly only needed to be there to provide ingredients, he'd stuck around when he saw Derek almost light his own sleeve and then the cookbook on fire, and he'd since been giving a lively tutorial on cooking basics. It was sort of comforting to sit in Derek's living room-- Will relocated when tomato puree started flying-- and hear the faint noises of dishes almost breaking and ingredients splashing to the floor in the background. Even Derek's startled _oh fuck!_ s faded into part of the ambient hum when Will got really focused on the project.

He’s going to have to create his own damn search function, in the end. Whatever is already there in the software is thoroughly unhelpful, turning up results that have only abstract connections to what he looks for: just to try and diagnose what was happening, Will searches "red" and comes up with a list of ID numbers for and 3D models of every individual poppy in the garden of somebody named Shruti. Before long, it's midday and then early afternoon, and then Will is startled out of his concentration by his own stomach rumbling.

Without thinking, he follows his nose to the now-quiet kitchen. "'S not exactly right," he hears Derek say. "Good though."

Bittle sees him first and smiles brightly. "William! Try this," he says, scooping something red out of a pot into a bowl and shoving it into Will's hands. His Southern twang seems just a little stronger today.

Still a little dazed, Will looks between Bittle and Derek, who's wearing an apron and holding his own bowl. "Jollof rice," he says, simply.

"Thank you," Will says. When he takes a bite, Derek shoves his fists into his pajama pants and waits.

Will swallows, feeling watched. "That's really good."

Both of the cooks look pleased, and then Will inhales sharply. The Poindexters are not weaklings, but they're only human, and Will's tongue is a little bit very on fire. _Toughenuptoughenuptoughenup,_ he thinks, but a tear slips down his cheek nevertheless. Derek is cackling, leaning on the countertop for support. "Oh, here," Bittle says, holding out a glass of milk.

"Okay," Will says, blinking fast, and Derek collapses to the floor in breathless giggles.

"Your-- ears--" he gasps, holding his stomach as Will takes a long swig from the glass. "So fast--"

For the space of about three seconds, Will fights to keep his dignity. "Y'all are a mess," Bittle says, and pops out of the room.

When Will locks eyes with Derek, still dissolved in a puddle in front of the sink, he can't hold it together.

“So you like it?” Derek asks.

Milk shoots out of Will’s nose.

 

* * *

 

For the length of the next few weeks, maybe a month, Derek finds himself settling into a comfortable rhythm. Either he wanders over to Will's house around mid-morning with a notebook-- he's bored, he tells himself-- or Will turns up at Derek's door with tablet in hand. They're both there, coexisting, until around dinner time. Will works steadily at the endless lines of code; Derek alternates his time between distracting Will, trying to write, and calling Bittle in to cook.

That first morning, he'd just needed to do something. He felt all the memories of all those nights around him like a crowd of people: candlelight catching on his mom's earrings and on the tops of her cheeks, scrunched up from smiling. Finding any excuse to light fireworks at his uncle's woodland property, watching his chubby nieces and nephews tilt their heads back to follow the glittering trail up into the sky until they overbalanced into his lap. Cramming onto one couch with all his siblings in their new clothes, Mama chiding them from behind the camera, trying to get an acceptable shot to send to her parents in Colombia. There wasn't enough space for it in his chest, for the storm cloud starting to form, making a sore spot at the bottom of his throat.

He'd even hoped against hope that one of the cookbooks would be his dad's copy, with all the extra slips of paper and the notes around the edges. Of course, they were all brand-new  books, but they had some of the recipes he remembered. It felt perfect and awful to chop the vegetables and smell the bay leaf and taste-test, over and over again, trying to make it taste the way the memories did. He even rubbed his eyes after he chopped the pepper, and he could almost hear his mom chiding him, squeezing his shoulders to lead him to the sink.

So of course, he can't stop cooking. He makes buttermilk fried chicken and tostones and apple crumble, and it doesn't make him sad, not always. He loved cooking with his parents as a kid, but then he didn't have the time as a teenager, and then in adulthood he rarely had the spoons to do more than microwave something. It feels good to turn on a burner without worrying about whether or not he'll remember to turn it off.

And it helps, in a weird way, to have Bittle's odd little presence over his shoulder half the time. Bittle, who insists he knows everything, but who knows his way around an apple much more effectively than a yam. Derek thinks privately that if a computer can walk and talk, it's probably complicated enough to have hobbies. Occasionally, it even helps that Will walks in and makes some kind of asshole comment. "William! Please tell Derek that beans are better when you throw a little bit of bacon in there," Bittle says one day.

"They super are," Will says, leaning across the breakfast bar to try and peek into the pots bubbling on the stove.

Derek glares at him. "I'm a vegetarian."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," Will replies mildly. "There's no animal suffering in heaven. Bittle, if I asked you for bacon right now, would any pigs be harmed in that process?"

"No sir!" Bittle says. "I would summon it from nothingness, because matter is meaningless in this dimension!"

Derek sticks his tongue out at both of them.

 

After that first day, he always foists some of whatever he makes on Will, who's usually been tapping on that screen for six hours or more. This is a little bit because he's afraid of Bittle's judgment about his manners, and a little bit because you're supposed to make too much food for one person, and even probably a little bit because he likes it when Will likes his food. Most of the time, too, he makes enough for the whole team. They ride in on a wave of noise and make sure that work has stopped for the day. Justin brings beer.

On the days when Will's more punchable than usual, Derek walks over to L’s. Since that night at the bar, she won't let any of them call her anything but Lardo. "I won this name honorably in battle," she says, and battle apparently means beer pong.

He gets a little secondhand high as they lie on the floor of the loft together; she makes two abstract paintings that are not identifiably Derek, but which were modeled off of him somehow. When he tells her that jock energy makes him nervous, she gets it. They paint each other's nails and debate whether or not postmodernism is a real movement.

And every time they're all in a room together, Derek finds himself trying to match up soulmates. He knows it's stupid, but he can't stop himself from sizing up their connections. They're all obsessed with each other to some extent; Derek is even obsessed with Will in his own way, but all their relationships are suffused with a kind of hesitation. They don't know if they're soulmates with each other or if new people will show up for each of them. Adam and Justin want to jump each other so badly that it's sometimes secondhand-embarrassing, but even then, even with the most immediate, obvious compatibility, neither of them are willing to cross the line until they're sure.

They all avoid the subject, though one night they get very drunk on Will's floor and Justin suggests that maybe they're in purgatory or something. George, head resting on Lardo's stomach, makes a considering noise. "Do you feel like this is all a test?" she asks.

Derek thinks to himself that no, it doesn't seem like a proving ground for his morality. He feels a way about all of these people that seems inevitable and whole, like all of the time he spends with them is entering the same bank as the candlelit holiday memories with his family.

He tries not to worry about it. He tells himself that, Will notwithstanding, he could easily be in love with any of these people. And Will is-- Will is wearing more and more of a groove in his life. He tries not to worry about that, either.


	7. stalking a hot mailman from your work computer

Duan, Larissa P: _Born Philadelphia, PA. Educated SUNY Purchase and SCAD. Art therapy in detention facilities, schools, and group homes; best-known for portrait series of imprisoned persons held for inability to pay bail. Played single most beautiful round of flip cup in American history. Lost points for naming cats "Pabst," "Heinie," "Nat," and other names derived from cheap beer labels._

* * *

Finally, finally, Will’s getting it. Or he's pretty sure that he is. Now when he searches "red," he sees high school sports teams and cocktail dresses and yes, still the poppies in Shruti's front yard, but he can dismiss most of the irrelevant data based on his labels, leaving something he thinks can comb through. This is the part of the project where he usually loses sleep, chasing the red thread through the maze, high on solving and solving and solving. He was dumped at least once just because of this single-mindedness.

Which is why it’s so odd that he looks at the way Derek walks through the living room and decides not to tell him.

As Will had suspected originally, Derek is quite a bit better at people than he is. The whole team clearly adores him, and it makes Will a little happy and a little lonely. Will feels like he’s friends with Chris-- well, anyone in a ten-yard radius becomes friends with Chris. But it’s nice to have someone around who understands what he’s saying about software. And he likes the rest of the team; they’re nice people. He just can’t pull them in the way Derek can: never embarrassed to say something awkward, with that laugh that sounds like a spotlight flipping on.

"Hey, Nurse," Will says. Derek turns over his left shoulder to make eye contact, and the corners of his lips tick up. White squares of four p.m. light fall from the living room window and onto Derek's shoulder, making it difficult to focus on his face.

Then there are times when Derek seems to fold in on himself a little. Silences distinctly different from their usual comfortable ones, where Will feels like if he reached out to touch Derek's shoulder his hand would go right through him. Will knows it's selfish, but those times make him acutely aware of his own emotional helplessness. He never knows what to do when people cry, much less when they seem like they're about to. Not to mention that Will suspects he already knows what the sadness is about-- Derek's family, that mysterious soulmate Will irrationally dislikes-- and he knows he can't help.

"Where are you off to?" Will asks, and feels stupid when Derek raises the hand holding his yoga mat.

"March and April are teaching," Derek says. "You wanna come?"

Will hates yoga more than he hates the foods that replace regular corn chips with Doritos. Out of all the exercise he's ever tried to do, including wind sprints, using an elliptical, and a fitness class that claimed it was based on U.S. Army conditioning, yoga is by far the worst. It's not even regular hard, the way exercise is supposed to be. It's brain-hard. Yoga is the equivalent of having group therapy with three clones of yourself. Yoga is the devil.

"Sure, of course," Will says, and he sets the tablet down.

"Is it even ethical for you to laugh at me while I do this?" Will hisses, buckling for the third time as he attempts to lift his left leg into the air.

Derek glances at him from his own effortless advanced downward dog. His tank top keeps falling down over his chin, but Will can still see that his eyes are crinkled in amusement. "Everyone starts somewhere," he says.

"You can start by kissing my ass," Will grumbles.

They'd agreed to take one of the back corners, as the two of them rarely got through any activity without ribbing each other. It's blessedly far from the instructors, who are making Will look like the dumbest dog that ever failed to pee on a fire hydrant, and their spot is right behind a handful of the guys from the team. (Including Chris, who he and Derek have agreed has the best ass of any human man they've ever seen.)

"So how's the project going, Robocop?" Derek says, possibly just to rub in the fact he's not breathing hard.

"It's going," Will huffs.

"Still seeing your friend Timmy everywhere?"

"TONY," Will corrects. "And yes." It is not possible to get sunburnt in the Good Place, but the back of Will's neck is giving it a try regardless.

From the front of the class, which is taking place on a grassy slope down to the park's pond, March and April announce permission to move into child's pose on their own time. Will immediately collapses into a ball, but Derek arches back just a little further. He actually enjoys this, Will thinks, with the one-quarter of his brain that is not occupied by the way Derek's shoulder and thigh muscles are shifting around, or the brave drop of sweat that rolls down the nape of his neck. "Show-off," Will says, reaching out to poke Derek's ass with his water bottle.

Derek yelps and drops down, the clumsiness that defines the rest of his movements returning. His exasperated face keeps getting softer as the days wear on; Will covertly watches him as they both relax back into child's pose.

"Actually," Will says. "You wanna know what's weird?"

"Your need to make everything a competition?" Derek replies.

Will ignores him, feeling a breeze pass over the damp back of his t-shirt. "I actually still haven’t found any mention of Bittle."

"Huh," Derek replies. "Well, you can't have looked through everything by now, right?"

More instructions trickle back from the front of the class. Will suffers his way through a transition to flat back extensions. "I mean, no, but Bittle is everywhere, right? He runs everything in the neighborhood. He's the default processor for any requests the residents have. I should have found at least a couple mentions of him by now, but I just-- haven't."

From the corner of his eye, he can see Derek waggle his head back and forth. "What I'm wondering is what state that accent is from. It's Southern, for sure, but like--"

"Bittle's a computer program," Will interrupts. "He can't have an accent."

"Well, Bittle says he can't do a lot of things that he does," Derek replies mildly. "You should do this more often, man. I can hear your tendons snapping from here."

Will rolls his eyes.

As they pack up their yoga mats-- Will's was a loaner, but he already knows he'll come back at some point-- Derek worries Will less. He seems to have moved that six inches forward to start living completely in his body again, and he laughs at himself when he trips on his own right foot and gets grass in his hair.

"Come on, hot mess express," Will says.

When he reaches down to pull Derek up, he uses a little more force than strictly necessary, and Derek stumbles forward, right into Will's space. Not quite touching, but close enough that Will can't look at both of Derek's eyes at once. He takes a breath as if to say something, then gets stuck.

Derek smiles at him and grabs him by the elbow, spinning Will toward their street. They walk a well-behaved distance apart, and Will doesn't make Derek laugh, but it’s a little too late to put back the memory of how it felt to kiss him.

* * *

“Holy shit!”

Derek has never heard Will’s voice go quite this high, in pitch or volume. He looks up from his notebook in time to see Will sweep into the kitchen like a kid with a crayon drawing, and to hear the vertebrae that pop when he holds the tablet over his head. He doesn’t look deliriously happy, exactly, but he looks proud of himself.

“Derek, I made it work. I searched for Adam’s name and his whole file popped up. Every data point ever recorded for him.”

Derek blinks, wide-eyed, tucks his pencil behind his ear. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s amazing!” Will replies, waving the tablet around like Moses with the ten commandments. “Here, look.”

He types something in, then tosses it to the counter in front of Derek.

_ Derek Malik Nurse, _ the search bar reads. A glowing circle rotates once, twice, but nothing happens.

“I mean, the whole function is a little slapdash, and the data pool is enormous, so it’ll maybe take a few minutes to turn over. But I swear it works!”

There is something stupid charming about this sudden Kid Will, the way he bounces a little bit with every step. “Okay,” Derek says. “Okay, so let’s go celebrate!”

Will fully jumps into the air. “Why not! It works!”

They get to the Celestial Scoop before the tablet is done loading. They even order (Moose Tracks for Derek; bourbon pecan for Will), and they settle at a table, and they have time to be interrupted by Georgia and Bittle and Lardo and Chris, in that order. Derek’s happy enough to see them all, but when Chris sits down and begins talking shop with Will, he fully tunes out. He’s getting better at understanding Will’s technobabble, but with those two together-- well, it sounds like the adults from Charlie Brown. His brain just won’t even try. So he strikes up a conversation with Lardo about whether or not Banksy was a hack, and his ice cream is melted by the time he’s alone with Will again.

"Oh, uh, Justin's having a pool party tonight because he decided that it's Saturday,” Derek says. “So we're going to that."

"Okay," Will says reflexively.

Derek wonders when it became second nature to assume that Will would go where Derek was going. He realizes, a little late, that he's been staring while Will taps impatiently at the tablet. His hair is on fire in the late afternoon sun, and his eyelashes are even longer than they look, with fanned golden tips at the end.

Then the tablet makes a chirpy, Bittle-esque noise, and they both startle; Derek looks away from the faint lines between Will’s eyes. "Oh, uh, I think I found you,” Will says. “Did you-- Andover, Pittsburgh, yeah, this looks like you. I'm seeing a lot of Presbyterian University Hospital, does that sound right?"

Derek starts to freeze. He knows he’s doing something wrong, because Will keeps looking up at him in that manic way, that please-tell-me-what’s-happening way, and he keeps parsing through the file. Derek remembers that the data is organized in such absolutely thorough detail that it's hard to pick out the important bits. It can take a minute just to scroll through all the information on a single second of a single day of somebody's life, so Will goes fast, scanning for things that look significant. “Intimidating acronyms, huh?” he says.

When Derek can make himself move enough to peer at the surface of the tablet, all he can pick out is the phrase “smells like disinfectant,” over and over. He’s starting to have a feeling like there's a cold hand closing around his stomach, getting tighter, pushing up on his diaphragm. "Derek, what's-- chronic traumatic en--"

Then, without telling them to move, Derek’s hands snatch the tablet off the table, and he physically cannot raise his eyes to look at Will. "Encephalopathy,” he interrupts.

“You had CTE,” Will says, but Derek doesn’t seem to hear him.

“Yeah, this is me," he says brusquely. "You're good, you found me."

"Sorry, I--" Will starts. He can’t think of anything to follow with

"So this works now?" Derek asks, and he can feel himself getting louder than is appropriate. "Do we-- what, meet with Jack and tell him?"  _ Is this almost over? _ he doesn’t ask. Derek has the same feeling he used to have when he went twenty over on the highway and missed his exit, so fast he almost couldn’t read the sign. He stands abruptly and does not look at Will as he hands it over.

"Yeah," Will says. "Yeah, I guess we do."

It takes him an extra moment to stand up.

The skin under Jack's eyes looks thinner. He leans forward in his 20th-century-professor leather chair and rests his elbows on his enormous desk. "What do you mean, you just need to run it again?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Derek can see Will swallow. "I found the data that belongs to each of us, to each of the people that don't have the right soulmates, and they actually make a lot of sense. Not the data, per se, but the labeling. For all of the other residents, right, their packets aren't labeled with their names, but they're differentiated better-- look, I don't really know the right terminology for this."

"Try," Derek says, and he can hear that his own voice sounds raw.

The office is darker than he’s used to; there are two floor lamps switched on behind Jack, but he can't see Jack's face all that well. Will is cast in the almost orange light that comes through Jack's lampshades, and his expression, usually so easy to read, is lost in anxious static.

"Basically, I don't think we got run through the soulmate algorithm at all. I mean, I identified the program, there's a bunch of resident files that have the signature on them from being sent through soulmate pairing, but none of the mismatched people have it. If you can just send us through again, I think we would actually get paired up right. And then maybe that’ll fix everything else; I'm not totally sure." Will is fast-talking like the world's gonna end.

Jack rubs his eyes, draws his hands down his cheeks. "I don't think we can actually do that," he says. 

"Ex _ cuse _ me?" Derek asks, and he catches Will’s panicked glance. But this has gone too far, and he just doesn’t care anymore.

"I mean," Jack says, "that we're more thoroughly cut off than I thought. Not intentionally, we're not in some kind of trouble, but it seems as if my connection to the rest of the architects and the larger databases are gone. That includes the soulmate algorithm. It certainly exists somewhere else, but it wasn’t in our system when we booted up."

Derek unclenches his hands from the armrests of his chair. He can see nail marks in the leather. "What does that mean for us?" Will asks.

"It means that you can sit back for a little while so I can look at our communications system," Jack says. "I'm so sorry. This must all be my fault, and I'll fix it."

"But we can help," Derek says hopelessly. "Can't we?"

Jack smiles at them. It's thin and drawn. "Look, you don't need to worry. I can and will figure this out. It just means that there's not a quick solution to this."

"What if I build the algorithm myself?" Will asks. Derek can recognize something cornered in his voice, hoarse and desperate. “We wouldn’t need to get the official one if I can reverse-engineer it from the correct pairings, right? I could do that.”

Jack sighs, shoulders visibly moving up toward his ears and back down. “Realistically speaking,” he says. “You’re limited. Our system is infinite. How long do you think that would  _ take _ ?”

Derek is surprised by the way Will’s voice sounds burnt and warped as he says, “I have forever, don’t I?”

* * *

On their way out, Derek hangs back to talk to Jack. Will isn't too good a person to linger outside the office door, not that he thinks he can walk much further than that.

"Jack, did you say we're cut off from heaven... HQ, or whatever?" he can hear Derek ask.

It's silent for a moment. Jack's voice is always low, and he sounds a little worn out today, so it's hard to hear him, but Will thinks he says something along the lines of "Roughly speaking, yes."

The conversation goes silent or inaudible for another beat. Will looks around the waiting room that he'd felt so warm and safe in on his first day here: the palms spilling out of their glazed ceramic pots, the chairs that felt like nothing. He paid close enough attention in his one college marketing class to know that the green palette and the cool-toned walls are designed to calm him down.  _ Fuck you, plants _ , he thinks.  _ Calm yourselves down _ .

Then Derek's voice is audible again. "So is it possible... is it possible to visit people in other neighborhoods? If they're in heaven too? Or are we just here forever?"

The vague person, the invented Derek-soulmate, pops into Will's head again uninvited. Of course Derek wants to see someone that important. It's unfair to expect that Derek could keep going like this, with Will, permanently. Will is embarrassed that he'd started to imagine the possibility.

Jack sighs loud enough for Will to catch. "No. Not now. Usually, residents of different neighborhoods can travel back and forth to each other at will, and often do. But we don't have access to that."

Will hears a sharp noise that he can't place.

"I'm so sorry," Jack says. "When all this is solved, you'll be able to visit other people."

After a minute or so, Derek strides forcefully through Jack's office door. He’s walking fast, but Will catches the red patches under his eyes, and his voice is torn up like he’d just cried. "You better fix this fast, Poindexter," he says, leading the way out of the office, back to Will.

Will accepts soundlessly that he'd do anything Derek asked. He avoids all the layers under that. "I will," he says, and means it.

He quietly walks Derek home, quietly leaves him on his front walk, quietly falls into the front door of his home. It’s well dark now, but Will only flips the lights on halfway. With all of them on, Will feels like he exists too much, and that means that people can expect something of him. In the half-light, he can float just a little bit outside of his body, like a cameraman shooting from his own perspective.

By now, he knows his house well enough to navigate in the dark. He walks to the fridge just to lean his forehead on the freezer door-- white plastic, like the refrigerator he had as a kid. Without moving his feet, he can just barely open the door far enough to reach in for the half-full bottle of chardonnay he'd shared with Derek a few nights ago. His entire body feels like lead, and he pops the cork as he turns and slides to the floor.

God, does Derek love his family. Will is jealous of the certainty that Derek so clearly feels, the way his emotion comes roaring up the column of his body. For most of his life, Will has felt as if he was missing some pipeline that everybody else seemed to have, something that did not allow adulteration or compromise, simply delivered a verdict on how you felt about what was happening. Then, later, he believed that those direct, body-felt emotions were fake. Just exaggerated whims, the property of people without the self-control to make good decisions.

But Derek doesn't lack discipline or the ability to self-sacrifice. He’s just honest.

Will only realizes when he tips the bottle so far back it hits the fridge door that he's finished the wine. In a regrettable train of thought, he just wishes he cared enough about somebody that not being able to visit them devastated him. He had friends, boyfriends, but nobody that makes him feel like he's missing a limb. Not the way he can see in Derek's eyes that being away from his family does him.

He pushes off the floor, stumbles to his living room with the vague thought of lying on his couch until he dies or falls asleep, whichever comes first.

The stars are bright enough that, with the lights all the way off, he can see the pine boughs swaying in the forest outside. Then, faintly, a bright white figure moving through the trees toward the beach-- Derek. It's too dark to tell, really, but based on the hunch of his shoulders, Derek looks just about the way Will feels.

* * *

 

Derek feels adrift and listless. He once told Fatima that these days felt like being a scrunched-up ball of magic tape: colorless, delineated, wound up in the middle, unable to unstick from his own sides and edges, impossible to get a detangling grip on. Since he came to in Jack's waiting room, he hasn't had to deal with the fog and exhaustion he's used to, but it's back like ghost pain in a severed limb: not debilitating, not necessarily real, but a habit his body and brain had learned to anticipate. And you can separate the soul from the screwed-up body, he supposes, but not from all the memories that made him a person.

For reasons he's not ready to examine, he had been disappointed when Will, trailing behind him all the way back to their cul-de-sac, only waved as Derek walked up the path to his own house. 

Derek had half-tried to do a handful of things. He’d sat in front of his notebook, full of descriptions his friends don't know that he wrote about them, and he couldn’t do anything besides make circles with his pen until the page looked full but wasn’t. He’d lain in his bed for a while, but it was only eight o'clock, and there had been an insistent tug in his stomach that said he had something left to do.  _ I don't, though _ , he had thought to himself.  _ I just have to sit here like I'm in the world's most luxurious MRI machine while someone behind a viewing window figures out what's going on. _

So instead, he pulls the blanket off his bed and walks barefoot to the beach. The night smells like the lavender shrubs behind Derek's house, and he feels buffeted along by the wind that's half sea breeze and half midsummer, which swirls in unlikely directions through the foliage along his path. The sand is still warm on top, but it gets cooler and damper as he nears the water. He can see Will's house nearby, on the far side of the trees, and there's light in the windows that he doesn't look into.

Derek settles with his back to the ridge of sand shaped by the very highest point of the tide. And there are the stars again, too many of them to believe. There isn't a gap in the velvet navy that doesn't, when he looks more carefully, have a star nestled in it.

And a few weeks ago, he'd relished how sure he felt about what a soulmate was like, but now he needs Jack to reassure him. He wants somebody else to tell him that he's right, that he hasn’t wasted all of their time.

He drops his head back against the sand. Now he feels responsible, somehow, for everything that's happening. Now he wonders if there's not an alternate version of this where he never said anything, where he just tried to go along with all of this. Kept his head down and give the system a chance, like Will had asked, and maybe everything would have worked out by now. Being in love with Will seems less and less impossible by the day.

Something in him rises up in rebellion at his lack of certainty.  _ Not this again _ , it says fiercely. He wishes it would quiet down.

There's the ball of magic tape again.

He's wrapped up enough in his thoughts that he doesn't notice Will's arrival until he sits down, knee nearly knocking into Derek's. On a different day, Derek would crack a joke about how only serial killers would ever wear jeans to the beach.

"I'm sorry," he says instead.

Will's quiet. "If you are," he starts hesitantly. "You're forgiven. But you don't need to be. And, uh, I'm sorry I looked at your file."

The silence between them feels delicately woven. Derek doesn't feel up to saying anything, but he knocks Will's knee with his own.

"You remember about my family?" Will asks.

He flexes his hands, fists them, weaves his fingers together. The movement is barely visible in the low light. "You can probably guess, pretty much," he continues. "They were religious and conservative and laced up that way, you know. And I was a great son when I tinkered in cars and set up my mom's WiFi and beat up the guy who broke my little sister's heart, and then I wasn't their son at all when I was gay." He takes a slow breath.

Derek turns to look at him. He gets instinctively that Will hadn't told this story in a while. His autumn-colored eyes are dark and fixed on an empty point close to the waves sliding up and down the sand.

"I've always been really good with my hands. When I was a kid, I scavenged parts off of old computers to build my own laptop, just to prove that I could. And then after the whole thing with my family, when I was on my own-- I didn't really have a choice about fixing that. So I looked for every other broken thing I could find and I didn't leave them alone until they worked again. I spent my whole life like that."

It's obvious from-- well, everything about him-- that Will's not usually a touchy guy. But Derek is, and he finds it a lot easier to offer comfort by resting his head on Will's shoulder than by trying to add some inane comment to the story. Will seems okay with it.

"I didn't even mean for them to know, you know?" he says with an acidic laugh. "They just came home early once, and that was it. I was out by the next afternoon. I think if that hadn't happened, I would have pretended to be the person they wanted until, I don't know, maybe until my parents died. I would have just patched it up over and over again."

Derek nods into Will's shoulder.

"All of this is just to say, you know, I get it. I desperately want this to be fixed, too. That's the thing I'm best at wanting. But I'm also in over my head. I spent my whole life trying to make things have clean solutions," he says. "But I have to admit that I might not be able to fix this."

The statement hangs like a winter breath in the air between them. Derek reaches out a hand to squeeze Will’s ankle. He doesn't feel so wrung out anymore, like every painful thing he remembers going through has been dried and hung up for everyone to look at. He can see through the thin skin over Will Poindexter's wrists to the blue veins underneath. Another certainty forms in his chest, like a pearl, one that Derek keeps forgetting and learning.

"Clean solutions aren’t part of the deal," he replies. "But people are built to fight for things. You can do that."

* * *

Close to midnight, Will realizes that Derek has fallen asleep on his shoulder. He watches the gentle rise and fall of Derek's chest for a moment, and it feels like saltwater on the parts of him that he just scraped raw.

Will jostles him awake, eventually, and walks him home, and Derek seems a little less like the walking dead, but not totally back to himself yet. When Will re-enters his empty living room, he considers picking up the tablet, throwing himself back into the numbingly infinite lines of text, but he feels what he thinks is a growing pain. Instead he writes a note to Chris, sends it via Bitty, and falls into bed.


	8. too many variables

Nurse, Derek M: _Born Manhattan, NY. Educated Philips Andover and The New School. Prominent activist for head injury intervention in youth athletics, esp. hockey and American football, and helped to establish revised liability conditions for sports executives. Published five collections of poetry. Primary point loss resulted from using zodiac signs as insults, ie "typical Aries."_

* * *

The front door of Chris's mansion is thrown wide open when Derek and Will walk up. Will is pretty sure Chris always leaves his door open, actually, so he stops on the threshold to knock. "Come in!" Chris yells, bounding around the corner into view. He slides a little on his teal socks. "So glad you guys came! Everybody's already in the back!"

They follow him through his homey but enormous place. It's a little like Justin's: big windows, open floor plan, high ceilings, but where Justin's house is tasteful and monochromatic, Chris's is absolutely drowned in San Jose Sharks memorabilia. "I almost forgot what he did for a living," Will mutters to Derek.

"Oh, no, he actually played for the Bruins for most of his career. He just really fucking loves the Sharks." Derek’s delivery is perfectly deadpan, and it takes Will a moment to burst into laughter

The back door-- also thrown open-- leads to a wide, slate-tiled patio. The sun is brilliant, which Will doesn't mind for once. It's brisk; the waves beyond Chris's hockey rink are all white-tipped, and it's somewhat below swimming temperature, but it's that kind of weather that whips Will up into childhood again. He wants to race somebody to the end of the grass.

That was kind of the goal for today. Last night, walking back from Derek's house in the dark, it finally struck him that he was in heaven. And it wasn't finished, per se, and maybe they were going to be stuck this way for a while, but why wouldn't that be okay? What was the point in being miserable all that time?

Everyone else is already there, engaged in a variety of lawn-party activities: a few people in the hot tub, a few others making elaborate cocktails, and Lardo is happily playing lawn golf against herself. "AYYY!" Adam shouts from a deck chair.

"Jack's here?" Derek says incredulously. "In jeans?"

Will shrugs. "He seemed like he needed a break just as bad as we did."

Derek stops and turns to Will. His hair moves over his forehead gently in the wind. "Are you, William Stickass Poindexter, telling me that this was your idea?"

"Are you complaining?" Will asks, eyebrows raised.

Derek grins at him, wide and warm, and Will flips his sunglasses down over his eyes in self-preservation.

"Okay, guys, guys," Chris says, waving his arms as he stands on a chair next to the grill. "So, obviously, you can keep using the hot tub or eating or playing games or whatever, but some of us have also discussed getting out on the ice."

Will desperately hopes that this is okay.

"You play hockey?" Justin asks.

Derek smiles ruefully. "Not really. I mean, I skated when I was younger."

"Christopher Chow," Caitlin calls from the hot tub. "Do you, perchance, just keep enough hockey gear on hand to clothe the entirety of the New York Rangers?"

Chris tries and fails to keep his smile down. "You know me!"

Will hasn't played hockey since high school, but it feels natural to lace up his skates again. They all go at the hockey gear-- which Chris does have in truly alarming quantities-- with varying levels of success. Chris, obviously, suits up like it's second nature. Adam, Justin, and Shitty all played in college, and they're all delighted to go again. Georgia was better than all of them in her prime, and better than Chris, he says. (“She could have kicked my ass,” he says. “I would have thanked her.”)

Bittle claims he's never skated before, but that he knows how to do everything, so this will be fine. Caitlin also never played hockey other than field, but she's a jock, and she looks competent when she steps onto her skate guards. Lardo looks as terrified as Will's ever seen her, but she stubbornly suits up with the rest of them, even if she leans heavily on Adam and Justin when she stands.

Jack, surprisingly, is possibly the most enthusiastic of them all. "Human sports are interesting," he says by way of explanation when he beats everyone else to the ice, but Will is pretty sure the half-smile on his face is the Jack version of peeing himself with excitement.

For a minute, they stand in the snow on the sides and watch the architect warm up to it. "Hey, this is fun," Jack yells.

"God, he looks familiar," Chris says.

As everyone spills onto the ice, Will lingers back with Derek, who didn't take long to put his gear on, but had this look on his face as he did. Not a bad look, Will thinks, just one that's hard to pin down. He’s prepared to go talk to him, ask if it’s okay that they’re playing sports, given his history. Maybe help him get oriented to the ice.

Instead, Derek glides onto the rink steadily-- not skating fast, but balancing easily. He takes a couple of strides, and when he finally turns to see where Will went, the odd look has blossomed into a brilliant smile. Will can't tell if the redness under his eyes is from the cold air or from emotion.

Typical heaven physics: the California-brisk weather surrounding Chris's house gives way just a few feet from the rink to the crisp brightness of a December thaw. It's perfect hockey weather.

For a while, they just fuck around on the ice, getting their balance (or, in Lardo's case, losing it repeatedly). Nobody's in any hurry. The sky is painfully blue, and Will relishes the flourishes that appear in the mirror-perfect ice under his skates. They're like kids, bumping good-naturedly into each other, falling into the snow around the rink, hooting with laughter when Shitty tries to lead Lardo by skating backward and runs smack into Chris, who'd been cheering them both on. _This is what we were missing_ , Will thinks. When he catches Derek's eye, he finds himself laughing twice as hard.

* * *

Derek shuffles back and forth on his skates. Drawing up teams is assigned to George, who goes about it with the same precise efficiency that she does everything else: Chris, Adam, Shitty, Jack, and Bittle to one side, Georgia, Justin, Will, Derek, and Caitlin to the other. Lardo begs off and settles into the snowbank near the center line, calling random penalties and throwing Junior Mints at them from a family-sized box that Bittle plucked out of thin air for her. The game is goofy and competitive; Derek's anxiety about getting back onto the ice fades when Adam blocks Georgia by picking her up in a bear-hug.

He savors the stretch and burn in his leg muscles, the way his lungs work to keep up with him. He'd been in a rink a couple of times after his injury, but never with anybody around besides Fatima, and the terror he expected to come rushing back when there are all these people and all these bodies on the ice with him just-- doesn't. Instead, he finds himself operating at the top of his lungs again. Laughing as loud as he possibly can, shouting without feeling self-conscious. He and Will make a surprisingly good team.

After the first pick-up game is done, he skates over to Lardo, plops down in the snow next to her. Everyone else is still bumming around on the ice, but Derek needs to take a break. His hockey tolerance is higher than he expected, but still not infinite. She holds out the box of Junior Mints, and he pulls off his glove to accept a handful. "Having fun?" she asks, and Derek knows that she means _Everything okay?_

"Yeah," he replies with a grin, really meaning it. "Yeah, it feels good."

They watch everyone else for a minute or two: Jack, who picked up the rules and technique of hockey terrifyingly quickly, is-- teasing Bittle? He has a playful expression on that Derek's never seen before, and he keeps skating around him in circles.

"Think there's something going on there?" Derek asks, motioning in their general direction.

Lardo watches them for a second, then explodes into laughter: "Oh my god, you're right."

"What's so funny?" Will asks as he skids to a stop nearby, showering them both with ice. Derek waits until he settles down on his other side before shoving a handful of snow down his back.

"Oh, come on!" Will splutters, and Derek dodges out of the way of his swinging arms.

"We were just discussing whether or not Bittle and Jack have a thing," he replies, wiggling his eyebrows.

"I see what you mean about the eye rolls," Lardo muses from Derek's other side. and Will squawks again.

"I'm not trying to be a party pooper, but you have to understand that you just suggested God’s getting dicked down by Siri!"

Just to play along, Derek keeps the argument going until Shitty slides up and holds out a hand to Lardo. "Wanna try again?" he asks, pulling his helmet off to let his shoulder-length hair down.

Lardo grumbles, but takes the offer. Shitty tosses his helmet into the snow next to Will and Derek as he skates away, towing a stiff-kneed Lardo in his wake. "Now, if you told me something was going on _there_ ," Will says after a pause.

Derek hums in agreement.

They sit without speaking for a while, and Derek listens to Will catch his breath. "I hope this is okay," Will says, finally.

Derek thinks for a second. This conversation is inevitable, really, but he's not sure he wants to have it now, while their fates are still up in the air, and they're getting dangerously close already. But then he huffs out the breath he was holding by accident and looks over to see Will looking steadily at him. Not with pity, but with an distinct carefulness.

"Yeah it is," he starts. "It’s been a while.”

"Okay," Will says.

"Um, I played hockey as a kid and up through high school. I wasn't great, but I was pretty good, and I banked on getting an athletic scholarship." Derek feels like he's reading a picture book to a kid. He was never good at telling this story, and by the end of his life he had a rehearsed, polished, public version, but had settled for being brief and vague when he told it in his personal life. He remembers everything Will told him last night and soldiers on.

"So, you know, it's not a gentle sport." Derek hugs himself, clenching and unclenching his hands on his upper arms. "And I was kind of a bruiser, just because got my growth spurt early. So I took a bunch of hits when I was pretty young, but nothing really happened. Then my junior year of high school, when I was kind of playing for college scouts, I got my second concussion, and it was--”

He pauses. He can feel Will gently knock their knees together. “It was bad. I don't really remember what happened, but one guy checked me and another guy fell on top of me and I was out for the season."

They both go quiet as Caitlin whips by, chasing Chris. The white noise of the skates sounds like waves breaking.

"Obviously, it was bad, but it also didn't get better the way it was supposed to? I still had these migraines, and I got diagnosed with depression, and by the end of the year they said that I couldn’t play again. And my life didn't, like, revolve around being an athlete, but I really felt like I couldn't do anything at all." He laughs bitterly. "The kicker is that once your head’s fucked up, you know it’s gonna get worse. The rest of my life, I felt like I was inside this-- this _balloon_. I had to push through this barrier to do everything, like it was all twice as hard as it needed to be, but I could only stretch the barrier out for a little while. I couldn't actually get through it."

"I'm sorry," Will says simply. He wipes at a phantom drop of sweat on his temple.

Derek shrugs. His heart is hammering like it always does when he tells this story; the brightness and the blueness and the audible conversation and laughter seem out of place. "Shit happens. And I mean, I didn't, like, lay down and die. You spent your life fixing things, I spent my life getting kids to go to therapy. But I still-- it was hard. And I never got to just do carefree shit like this, ever."

He looks over and locks eyes with Will, who looks away quickly, like he's been caught. "Um, thanks for telling me," he says, all the bony edges of his awkwardness showing, and Derek feels a rush of fondness.

Knowing and being known by Will Poindexter feels a little bit like falling off a cliff. Derek knows that he drags his right foot a little when he turns sharply, and what he looks like when his hair is wet with snow and plastered to his forehead, and how gentle he tries to be when a guy he hated a month ago spills his sob story everywhere. He tries to picture that tightly-held pale person, the version of Will who was all raised hackles and judgment, and he can’t reconcile him with this one. The one who tears up with him.

"All right, back to it," Derek says, clapping his hands on his knees to stand back up. "I missed like thirty years of this, let's _go_!"

* * *

 

They don’t leave the ice until the floodlights click on, and then they all warm up around Chris’s stupid-modern glass fireplace until Will feels half-asleep. Still, he and Derek take the walk home as slow as they can.

“Did the fresh air do your little indoor goblin soul good?” Derek asks, amused.

Will knocks their shoulders together. “Yeah, it did. All that’s left to do is sift through endless information trying to reverse-engineer that algorithm. Figure out what the hell those missing programs are, if I’m lucky.”

“Our friend Tony?” Derek asks teasingly.

“Yeah, that asshole,” Will says with a smile.

“Well, hey,” Derek says, knocking Will’s shoulder again. “Don’t drive yourself nuts doing it. We’ll be fine.”

What’s happening now isn’t permanent, Will knows, and he feels the impending arrival of Derek’s real soulmate, that vague person he hates, as acutely as ever. But he’ll use the time that he has. These months or years are just as real as the eternity that comes afterward.

They separate at Derek’s front path, as much as Will doesn’t want to. He watches Derek walk up to his door, not sure what to say, and then quietly calls “Hey, Nurse.”

He turns around with his hand on the knob, looking soft and bemused.

“Sorry you’re stuck with me for a while,” Will says.

Derek’s gentle laugh carries out to Will. “I don’t think I mind.”

The next morning, Will’s not sure he wants to get back to work on the tablet, so he’s wracking his brain for some other reason to walk over to Derek’s house when Bittle appears. He looks a little pale, Will thinks, maybe because he wasn’t designed to do things like play hockey for hours on end, but his smile is still brilliant. “William Poindexter!” Bittle says. “Jack wants to see you right away.”

“Okay,” Will says, following the dandelion-puff of hair through his front door. Bittle is on a mission; he doesn’t even pause to let Will put on his shoes. He walks like a video game character— precisely down the established path, no shortcuts across anyone’s lawn, even though he’s hurrying more than Will’s ever seen him hurry.

“Do you normally walk places?” Will asks, out of breath.

Bittle doesn’t respond, he just power-walks up Derek’s front path and through his door without knocking. “What does Jack want to talk to us about?” Will pants.

Derek’s sitting at his kitchen table, and looks nonplussed when Will waves to him.

“Derek Nurse, Jack wants to see you right away,” Bittle says, then turns without waiting for Derek to respond. “I do not know what Jack wants to see you about, but he says it’s important.”

When Derek, still holding half a bagel, looks to Will for answers, he can only shrug. They fall in together as they half-jog behind Bittle. “Does he normally walk?” Derek asks.

“That’s what I said!” Will whispers back.

It’s early, but not too early for the neighborhood center to be dotted with people. They look generally confused; Will sees Shruti, the woman with all the poppies, spill coffee on her shirt as she watches them pass at what can now be honestly described as a sprint.

“Yo, Bittle, you look kinda freaked,” Derek says as quietly as possible.

“I am a computer,” Bittle replies without slowing. “I cannot be freaked.”

When they reach the door to Jack’s waiting room, Bittle ushers them through first. “He’s in his office. Go right in. He said it’s important.”

“We got that, Bittle, thank you,” Will says, and follows Derek into the next room.

Where, in the chair across from Jack, there is a blonde person he knows he has never seen before. Jack is back in his navy suit, but he looks paler and more stretched out than he did on the first day of orientation. He buttons the jacket as he stands. “Derek, Will, one of our missing residents has arrived,” the architect says, gesturing with a hesitant hand.

The blonde person turns around. She’s a slight woman with a few freckles, and between the friendly expression and the enormous brown eyes she looks just like--

“ _Dicky_?” she cries.

The woman is in tears almost immediately. Bewildered, Will follows her gaze, turning to see Bittle standing with one hand on the office door, caught in the act of closing it. He looks blank and panicked at the same time, stalling like a car on a cold morning. No one else in the room even considers moving, and in the stillness, the way Bittle hunches is all too obvious. “I’m sorry, no, my name is Bittle,” he replies, and Will is surprised to see a tear fall without warning from his right eye. “I’m your operating system here in the Good Place.”

“No, you’re Dicky,” the woman insists. She has that accent, too, and it gets stronger as she wipes under her eyes, hard. “You’re my son, and my God I missed you so much.”

Bittle, now crying in earnest, says, “You misunderstand, I’m Bittle. I’m your helper.”

But the woman is already out of her chair and clutching his hands in hers. Bittle looks helplessly between her and Jack, and the room is silent for an agonizing moment before Jack, with a catch in his voice, gently says, “ _Bitty_.”

Bittle—Dicky?—dissolves immediately. “Oh, my lord, Mama,” he sobs, and he pulls her to him like a life raft.

“I don’t understand,” Derek whispers, then sniffs.

“Same,” Will replies, to the idea and the emotion.

They both look at Jack, who looks just as confused and possibly more emotional. He flips through the papers in a folder. “ _Crisse_ , I don’t know. This woman is indeed named Suzanne Bittle, and she does have a son named Eric Bittle, who is—“ he stops on a page with something paperclipped to it.

Will and Derek both lean over Jack’s desk. There’s a photo of the two people wearing aprons, and they look remarkably like the ones currently sobbing into each other’s shirts in the middle of Jack’s office. “Oh my god,” Derek says. “Bittle’s a person.”

“It looks that way,” Jack says.

“But what the hell does that mean?” Will hisses. “How did you get this folder for her? How did she get here in the first place?” When he glances over, Derek looks like he’s ready to leave the planet.

“Well, out of everything a neighborhood is built to do, it’s meant to accommodate its residents. Having a soul locate its own neighborhood is like, erm.”

“Like using a satellite phone?” Will starts, but then Derek begins to frantically tap them both on the shoulder.

“If Bittle’s a human, he’s not our O.S.,” he states. “Right?”

“Right,” Jack says.

“Okay.” Derek inhales through his nose and exhales through his mouth. “Don’t laugh at me if I’m wrong.”

“You won’t be wrong,” Will says, and Derek looks at him warmly, just for a half-second.

Then, over the noise of Bittle and his mother beginning to hiccup and laugh, of Jack talking to himself aloud, Derek raises his voice. “Excuse me, Tony?”

With a noise like a sink unclogging, two people pop into the space behind Jack’s right shoulder. The one with Bittle’s perfect posture, a bright-eyed, helpful looking brunette, and immediately chirps, “How can I help?”

The dark-haired woman with a death grip on his shoulder, on the other hand, looks a little less put-together. She takes a few deep breaths before speaking, but when she does, it’s at top volume: “Oh thank _FUCK_  we found you!”


	9. i might legit be into tahani

Zimmermann, Jack L:  _Born Montreal, QC. Search and rescue crew member for 30 years (see pages 4-9 for list of lives saved). Points deducted for nicknaming a junior hockey teammate "Saggy."_

Bittle, Eric R: _Born Athens, Georgia. Educated Samwell University. Co-owner, with mother Suzanne, of local bakery chain Oh, Honey, run as a nonprofit to support welfare efforts for homeless youth. Lost points for taking French class in college. Earned a few back because his accent was awful._

* * *

“This is really impressive,” Ford says, swiping through Will’s tablet. “We knew you had a brain on you, but,” and she whistles.

Derek is pleased that, in a world full of chaos and sudden uproar, Will can be relied upon to turn bright red. 

“So, how’d I turn into, um, one of him?” Bitty asks, sandwiched between Jack and Suzanne on a Tony-created couch. All three of their eyes are red-rimmed. He gestures to Tony with the hand that’s still clutching a tissue.

Ford sets the tablet down and tightens the scarf around her hair. “Okay, well, here’s the thing. I designed this neighborhood. I got to know each of you in detail. I built the houses, I lovingly named the shops and streets, I spent a decade just molding poppies.”

“Those were cool,” Will interjects.

“Thank you,” Ford says. “I’m almost done with the place, right, there are just a handful of temperatures to adjust and pairings to finish, and I leave the office for the day thinking I’ll be finished tomorrow.

“And then,” she leans over the desk, putting weight into her fingertips. “I come back the next day and the  _ beautiful _ sports car that I built from the ground up has taken off without me.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Bittle says.

She laughs and sits down in the desk chair. “It’s not your fault. See, the power grid behind these neighborhoods is you— your souls, and especially your souls together. That’s part of the reason that we select the compatibility of the neighborhood residents so carefully. It keeps the gears turning. But when all of your souls— you and the other residents you told me about, with the mismatched soulmates— were starting to arrive here, they clicked so well together that they got overexcited. And you took off without me or Tony or, like, a  _ bunch _ of your neighbors. Including poor Suzanne.”

“So we were, what, automated?” Derek asks. He thinks, privately, that Will was overstating how difficult it was to explain computer things.

Tony nods pleasantly. “Fun fact: that made you  _ impossible _ to find!”

“Yeah, what he said,” Ford continues. “And the neighborhood just kinda filled in the gaps I hadn’t finished yet. It tossed Jack into the architect role and Eric into the Tony role because you were the best fit for those parts, gave you both the bare minimum requisite memories. It threw the unpaired residents together, cause you were all kind of close enough.”

“That’s what happened to me and Derek?” Will asks.

“Oh, yeah,” Ford starts to laugh. “Yeah, that one was pretty fucked up. Your soulmates  _ super _ aren’t here yet.”

Right. That’s what this means.

Derek had almost forgotten that fixing all of the neighborhood’s problems meant the end of his little bubble with Will. He’s surprised at his own anxiety. This is what you wanted, he thinks to himself. Like Mom and Mama had.

He just hadn’t expected it to be over so soon.

“I honestly think this would have gone on for a while,” Ford said. “You’re all so damn competent— I mean, Jack, you did a really spectacular job.” Jack smiles shyly. “Except Derek here cottoned on to what was happening. I knew I liked you.”

“Yeah, how  _ did _ you know?” Will asks, turning in his seat to face Derek.

Derek looks at his freckled face and shrugs, still working past the lump in his throat. “Well— you said Bittle wasn’t in the computer. And every time I hung out with him, I kept forgetting he wasn’t a person, and, like, why does he have a Southern accent? And then if he was a person, there was a different O.S. that we’re supposed to have, and Jack was talking about those hardwired functions of neighborhoods and I— well, you were always talking about TONY. So I tried hitting him up.”

“And well done,” Ford says, nodding slightly toward him. “Tony is by nature connected to this neighborhood, so you called him, we were finally able to locate exactly where you are. And now, thank  _ God _ , you’re tethered in to the system. Will, do you have any plans for tomorrow?”

Will tilts his head. “No-o,” he says carefully.

“Excellent,” Ford says. “I should have all the little details polished up by then, and I’d like your help managing the reassessments. I’ll let everyone know that I’ll be doing tune-ups in the morning— make sure everyone’s in the right housing arrangements, all that jazz. Match you with your real soulmates. The trains will start running again. So out, out!” She shoos them with her hands.

Everyone stands up, but Derek is working up his courage to ask, finally. Will, bless him, stays in his chair as well. “Can I ask you a question?” Derek says tentatively.

“Of course,” Ford says. “Anything.”

“My moms,” he says, voice thick. “They were soulmates, weren’t they?”

Ford smiles at him tenderly. “Yeah, Derek Nurse. They are.”

  
  


They go out for a last drink together, because of course they do. Derek remembers only as he slides into the booth, hip touching Will's, that he's supposed to be relieved.

And he sort of is. This is it, you know? The empty places in his universe where Fatima, Mom, Mama should be only have to wait a little longer. "God, I can't wait to see my little brother again," Lardo is saying when Derek tunes back in.

"Oh my god, I have parents," Jack says, breathless with laughter. " _ Tabarnak _ ,  _ maman et papa. _ "

Bitty, understandably, is off somewhere catching up with his own mother, but Jack had agreed to come to the bar with the rest of them. Derek had expected him to be freaked out, but this is miles and miles better: Jack laughing, remembering his whiskey preferences, slapping Shitty on the shoulder when he makes a joke.

Suddenly, Justin's eyes are bigger than Derek has ever seen them, and he sets down his beer before he rabbit-punches Jack's shoulder with both hands. "What?" Jack asks, and Justin gestures wordlessly for a moment, seemingly overcome with excitement.

"You're from Quebec, aren't you?" he says finally.

Jack smiles and laughs, even when Justin stands up to scream: "I fucking  _ knew _ it!"

Will nudges Derek's side with his right elbow. He's tucked up into the corner of the booth, withdrawn slightly from the action, but he looks content: eyes relaxed like a sleepy cat, glowing bronze hair mussed on the side where he's leaning on the wall.

"You were right," Will says, and Derek claps a hand over his heart.

"Well, that's a moment I'm never going to forget," he says. "Right about what?"

With a mischievous glint in his eye Derek's not used to seeing, Will shrugs. "I mean, Jack and Bitty are definitely gonna fuck now."

Though he manages to stave off a full spit take, Derek's eyes water as he tries to contain his laughter, and a few drops of his beer definitely escape and drip down his chin. Will jostles his shoulder.

The other guys decide it's appropriate to toast, then-- to the end of an era, Adam says. Chris, arm unsubtly around Caitlin, points out that they're all going to see each other tomorrow. And the day after, considering they're still shacked up in the same heavenly neighborhood.

"Not if I drink as much as I'm planning to, motherfucker," Adam replies.

After the cheers die down, and the new Bittle-- Tony-- brings them another round, Derek settles back into Will. "A lot’s changing, huh?” Will asks.

Derek looks at him sideways. “Yeah, I feel like it’s sort of the last night on earth, you know?”

Will chuckles. “Time to go batshit,” he says.

“Yeah?” Derek asks, laughing. “What would you do if you knew it was your last night on earth?”

He looks back at Will for a reaction—a laugh, an eye roll, even. Instead, Will is just staring at him, totally undisguised, and the look on his face is unmistakably somber. Derek doesn’t say anything, and Will doesn’t say anything either, and they eventually break their eye contact.

He thinks he feels like a coward.

 

* * *

 

When they’re good and tipsy, the team splits up. Will and Derek agree without really saying it aloud that they’ll spend the evening together-- for the last time, most likely. It probably says something that Will can’t imagine his real soulmate would be okay with him spending the night in with Derek.

It begins to rain on their way back, the first time since they’ve been in the Good Place. A few fat droplets at first, but by the time they can see Derek’s house, it’s pouring so hard the air looks white.

They run, laughing, for shelter, not fast enough to avoid being soaked. But after they collapse onto Derek’s front step, catching their breath, neither of them seem to know what to do next. The day feels too urgent, too final. Will clears his throat, telling himself he at least has to try. He can’t stop thinking that Derek didn’t meet his soulmate on earth, that it changes something. “So you really knew, huh?”

Derek smiles at him sideways, trying to shake the extra water out of his hair. “I know everything, Poindexter.”

“I meant, you were right about us from the beginning. How?”

Derek runs his hands slowly over his scalp, plants his elbows on his knees. He’s speaking more to the ground when he says. “I just knew. I was so sure. Growing up with my moms I saw the way they were. It was, like, one of the fundamental facts of the universe that they belonged together. Then when I came here and my head felt clear for the first time in--decades, I guess-- and I didn’t have to question whether we were soulmates at all. It was such a relief.” Will tries not to flinch. "I mean, like, I had memory problems for so long, and people would have to correct me on what happened and who I'd met and I just  _ hated _ it. So much. So when you told me I didn't know what I was talking about, I really— I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry,” Will says honestly. “About pretty much everything I said those first few days. I was a dick, and I was mad you wouldn’t play along to make my life easier. I think I told myself it was your fault for poking holes in everything, when really I didn’t trust that I was actually here.”

The rain isn’t letting up, not even a little bit. “It wasn’t okay, but I get it,” Derek says. He sticks his hand out just far enough to catch a few drops on his fingertips, and Will can see that he’s shaking.

Will shuffles forward on his seat, at a loss the way he always is when the very muscles and bones of him ached to help somebody. He’s sure as he scooches forward to wrap his arms around Derek's hunched shoulders that he's doing the wrong thing. But Derek collapses back into him instead. 

Will feels his chest get warm with the sudden realization that Derek wasn't thinking of his own soulmate, but his moms-- that he isn't a placeholder for anybody else. He hides his face in the cableknit over Derek's shoulder and takes a deep breath.

“Hey Derek?” he asks. “You wanna learn how to make pancakes?”

 

The rain doesn’t stop, and so they’re swept along in the process by Huey Lewis and the sound of endless tapping on the window. They start from scratch, too, no mix. Derek is surprised to learn that the batter is meant to have some lumps in it. “All part of the balance, Nurse,” Will says.

They make them plain with maple syrup, and then chocolate chip, and then blueberry, which Derek says reminds him of visiting his grandma up in Michigan. Will flips them with the concentration of a neurosurgeon, and rolls his eyes but can’t not smile when Derek tries to toss blueberries down the collar of his shirt. They eat until they can barely move, and then they fall prone on Will’s overstuffed couch, legs knocking together in the middle.

Will does not bother making up an excuse not to go home. Instead, they just giggle at each other until Will starts to doze-- not aware of much except for gentle hands tucking a blanket around him, the vague figure of Derek disappearing up the stairs. He does not fall asleep, not really, but he looks up at the floral-wallpapered ceiling, hands wound tight at his chest, and imagines that he can hear Derek breathe.

 

* * *

 

Derek looks up when he hears the floors creak, wondering at the fact that it seems exactly right to have another body in the house. He can barely see the outline of Will in his doorway, broad shoulders slumped. Derek sits up on his elbows and raises his eyebrows in a question.

"Sorry," Will says, and Derek fears for a moment that he'll turn around and disappear back into the ark of the living room. "Can I--"

Derek waits for a second, then lifts up his quilt in invitation. “You didn’t have to sleep on the couch.”

Will hesitates in the doorway before padding silently to the other side of Derek’s bed and sliding in. "Thanks," he whispers as he wiggles into a comfortable position. He's on his left side, facing away from Derek, but he's close. Derek only hesitates a second before he wraps an arm around Will’s waist, half-spooning him. He makes a gentle noise and settles back, hips slotting inside Derek’s, one ankle creeping between Derek’s feet.

They both take huge, shuddering breaths. The air feels heavy; Derek forces himself to breathe slowly, like someone about to fall asleep, but it just collects the peppery amber smell of Will more effectively. He lets his head roll forward, pressing on the nape of Will’s neck.

"Thank you," Will whispers.

Derek feels the unsteady thump of his heartbeat in his stomach, and he exhales sharply. "Thank you for what?" Derek whispers, grabbing Will's hand in his own, squeezing.

Will doesn't reply.

Instead, he begins to turn over, and Derek’s heart stops as he sees the familiar dark-honey of his eyes lit sideways by the slanting moonlight. When Will is facing him, head resting on Derek’s crooked elbow, they both smile with closed lips. "Thank me for what, Will?"

When he doesn't reply, Derek-- emboldened by the horrible fact that this is their last night-- leans forward to press their foreheads together. Will tilts his chin forward, nose sliding into place against Derek's cheek, and kisses him.

Will tastes like spearmint, and the tip of his nose is cold but the inside of his mouth is searing. They inhale together, suddenly, and Will pulls Derek flush against him by the waist. It's not heated, not really, but Derek feels the mutual need to be so close they take up the space of one person and not two. Maybe then, he thinks illogically, they can both stay here together, and when Will’s real soulmate appears they will have no clue that Derek is already residing in the space that Will alone used to take up.

He grabs the collar of Will’s sleep shirt in his right fist, trying to communicate with the slow, certain pressure of his lips that this could be it for him. That if Will wanted Derek to stay, he would.

Will reaches up to cup the back of Derek’s head and licks at the seam of his lips, and Derek opens up with relief, like a fern unspooling. He sucks on Will’s tongue and presses forward with his hips.

Then he rolls onto his back, still gripping Will’s t-shirt, and as suddenly as it began, the kiss turns into something burning and purposeful. He feels Will’s thigh fall between his own, and he draws his fingertips down Will’s stomach.

It is not at all like it was the first time. Derek finds himself unable to give up Will’s lips even for a second, not until Will slides a finger into him and Derek gasps, head driving back into the pillow. It's slow, deliberate, insistent, like waves hitting the shore. Derek isn’t impatient to come, but he doesn't have time to waste either, and he kisses Will softly, barely separating their mouths as he asks for what he wants. Will, gently, lifts up Derek’s right knee as he slides home. Derek whimpers into the darkness of his room, and Will sucks comforting kisses into the soft underside of his jaw.

That's really all there is to it. It's slow, and Derek wishes as he wraps his legs around Will’s hips that it would slow down. They move together without speaking, without letting go, releasing into the sound of the grass crashing like waves under Derek’s open window.

 

* * *

 

Will wakes up early-early, a sliver of sunlight falling through the blinds and onto his face like a warning. He was afraid that he and Derek would be tangled up together, the way they fell asleep, but they’re not. Instead, they’re chastely relegated to their own sides of the bed, just curled toward each other like parentheses. That feels much more intimate.

It hurts, somewhere near his lungs, like a stitch he’d get while running. Derek makes him out of breath. But it’s one thing to fall into bed with the person that the universe locked you in the supply closet with, and it’s entirely another to give up your actual soulmate—the one in ten billion, with whom everything will be easy and immediate and sweet—for them. And Will might be idiotically, mind-scorchingly in love with Derek Nurse, so in love that he wouldn’t even need to think about it for a second, but he can’t ask Derek Nurse to make that choice for him.

Instead, he gets up as quietly as he can, and he gets dressed, and he grabs a blueberry pancake to eat on his way down to Ford’s office.

 

He is objectively aware that this process is interesting. Ford has the energy of someone who didn’t sleep last night, although Will is pretty sure she doesn’t need to sleep at all. She bustles around, handing him first one piece of machinery and then another. They all look comical, like technology from Santa’s workshop-- at one point, Will is fairly sure he’s holding a spinning barbershop pole. Not that he can question it.

“Really a remarkable job,” Ford says again as she flips through Will’s tablet. “So this list is for the wrongly-matched pairs?”

Will nods. “That we know of, but I mean, I can’t be sure.”

Ford looks at him with the assessing eye of a crow. He wonders if she can tell that he hates this. Probably, right? Given the amount that she knows about the universe? “Well, we’re bringing anyone in anyway,” she says finally. “Just a check-up, of sorts, make sure they’ve found their way to the things I’ve made for them. I didn’t see very much out of place on my walkthrough last night, but better safe than sorry. And this way, I get to meet everyone for real.”

At long last, she hands Will a final item: a cartoonish red button that says REPAIR in white letters. There’s a square plastic cover over it, like it’s a missile launch switch.

Then Tony appears to take his place by the door, and the neighbors begin to come in.

For hours, Will holds out a button to pair after pair of glowing people. None of them are matched with someone else. A few, here and there, are told they’ll need a few new installments in their home, and a blonde kid Will’s never met named Louis gets a foot shorter. He’s still absurdly tall, but he sighs with relief as he shrinks to about 6’5’’. “Sorry about that,” Ford says.

The first unpaired person to be called in is Jack. “Thank you, again, for bearing up so well while I was absent,” Ford says, and Jack waves her off.

Will flips the lid on the button. Jack plants his hand on it, and Ford watches her tablet screen carefully as the results are tabulated. Will doesn’t look over, feeling somehow that it’s a private moment, but he does see Jack press a hand to his lips.

“Tony,” Ford says. “Can you call Eric Bittle?”

Tony sticks his head into the waiting room, and Will can see Eric stand up from his chair. He moves like a hummingbird, graceful and sudden and fast as hell, too; he’s halfway through the door before Will can process what’s going on. He barely seems to register that Derek, Ford, or Tony is there, and it’s the first time Will has ever seen Bittle be rude.

“Really?” he says breathlessly as he locks eyes with Jack.

Jack’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a coffee grinder full of pebbles, but there’s a smile deep inside it. “Yes,” he replies, eyes shining, and Bittle launches himself at Jack so hard Tony has to wink out of the way to avoid being crushed.

Jack spins him around cinematically, face buried in Bitty’ cardigan so only the happy crow’s feet around his eyes are visible. Will feels the pain like he’s missing a limb.

 

* * *

 

“Where’s Dexy?” Justin asks, kicking his legs as they stew in Ford’s waiting room. “Woulda thought he’d be all excited for today.”

Derek nods. “He’s helping Ford with the sorting thing. But I think he’s into it.”

It had been painful to wake up alone. Derek had kicked himself for being surprised, even hurt; he had known for weeks that this thing wasn’t going to last forever. He’d been the one who made sure it didn’t. They’d talked about how it was temporary, even if they stopped acting like it somewhere along the way. Even if Derek can’t imagine doing forever with anybody else— this is what he’d promised, right? That Will would get his happily ever after?

Endless pairs of people troop in and out as they all wait: Mandy and Jenny, Shruti and Camilla, Alexei and Kent. They’re all just getting minor check-ups; the island of misfit toys has to wait for last.

Derek loses himself in a spiral of worry, only resurfacing when Tony begins to call for the team. When Lardo heads into the office, Shitty begins to sniffle, and when she comes back out to tell him they’re soulmates, he breaks into tornado-siren sobs. “I know, babe,” she says, rubbing his back as she guides him out the door. And Derek’s never seen Chris as anxious as he is when he walks up without Caitlin, but he calms down when they leave together.

Leave is actually a generous description. The door into the hallway is mostly glass, and from where Derek is sitting, he can see the two of them making out a few feet down the corridor.

Justin’s in Ford’s office for almost no time at all, certainly less than everyone else has been, and when he reemerges Derek almost worries that something’s gone wrong. Then he walks purposefully toward Adam.

“Hey, man,“ Adam says vaguely, shaking out of the fugue state he’s been in all day.

Justin isn’t smiling his broad, Ferris Bueller grin, but there’s something about him that looks like he’s having a hard time staying on the ground. “Hey,” he says to Adam, holding out a hand to help him up. “Guess what?”

Adam doesn’t grab the hand, and he doesn’t stand up. He just cradles it gently and  _ looks _ at Justin for a second, then presses a kiss to the center of his palm. Derek was close to tears before this all started, and now he tries to wipe his eyes before they get red.

Derek is last. He feels, as he walks toward the inner sanctum, like he’s in an airplane gaining altitude. He carefully closes the door behind him before looking toward Ford’s desk. He meets Will’s eyes first, and they’re swollen and happy-sad. “It’s been a long day,” Will jokes, not hiding the roughness in his voice.

Ford sits cross-legged on her desk, hair tied all the way up today. She’s cleaning her glasses as Derek enters, but she quickly puts them back on. “Welcome, welcome!” she says. “Good to see you again!”

“You too,” Derek says.

Leaning against the desk, just to her right, Will’s holding a box with an obnoxiously red button. It seems a little on-the-nose. 

“Go ahead!” Ford says delightedly. “If you’ll just tap that button for me, we’ll set you up with an soulmate, and you can really get this afterlife started.”

Derek feels like he’s walking through water to get to them. He looks at the button, then at Will. 

Will’s honey-colored eyes are perfectly steady as Derek lifts a hand to the button, then pauses when Will opens his mouth.

“I just—I know the past couple of weeks were weird,” Will says. “But I really loved them.”

Derek feels himself urging the plane higher, higher.

He doesn’t want an algorithm, or a perfect person. He wants something messy and sometimes argumentative and hard and worth it. When he stares unashamedly at Will’s stupid freckles and his bright-red ears, he feels the tug in his chest of coming home after a long time away. Giving it up would be hell.

And stupid.

Will clears his throat. “Okay, are you ready?”

Derek finally breaks. “No.”

Ford and Will cock their heads at him simultaneously. “I don’t--” Derek attempts to continue. “I thought it would be this unbeatable thing, you know, to have a soulmate. I had this idea about what it would look like for everything to be perfect, but imperfect doesn’t mean-- wrong.”

From behind the desk, Ford says, “You don’t want your happy ending?”

She doesn’t look judgmental or angry or confused, just serious. Derek laughs, tears in his throat, and replies directly to her. “Not a different one.”

To Will, who has damp eyes, but a face like the sun rising, he says: “I love you, Will Poindexter. So push the button if you want, but don’t do it for me.”

The button clatters to the table, and suddenly Derek has an armful of grinning redhead. He wraps his arms around Will’s waist, all the way, so that his face is only a warm amber blur, and he kisses him senseless.


	10. she makes the bass drop in my heart

Functionally, weddings are pointless here. There aren’t any assets to split. Commitment is a given, legalities don’t exist in any meaningful way. And as far as Ford knows, weddings on earth-- the literal process of them, the physical realities of planning and walking and trying on and cutting and choosing-- so  _ much _ choosing-- only really produced a limited amount of joy. She’d seen the stats. She could prove it to you.

But in their charmingly contrary way, humans still loved to have them. It was an excuse, as so many of their activities were, to get all together in stainable clothes and drink out of those fragile ceremonial glasses and dance with each other. It’s one of their universals; existed in some form or another in every culture in every corner in every time. There’s never been a group of humans in history that didn’t like to make a big to-do out of the forming and expanding of their little families. And despite her fundamental perfectionism and all-seeing architect’s eye, Ford has to admit that the wedding of Georgia Martin and Suzanne Bittle is an admirable to-do.

God, but Ford is fond of people.

The brides themselves-- one in white, one in royal blue-- look like incandescent lightbulbs. All lit up inside, and you can see right through to the shape of the glowing filament. Around them, the endless families-- Jack and Eric, looking happier than a pair of dolphins let out to sea. A series of dark- and fair-haired cousins. Adam and Justin, who she can hear whispering as they waltz about reenacting some scene from a Swayze movie. A few dozen assorted hockey players, and Chris and Caitlin-- Chris still holding the bouquet of magnolias and ferns he’d caught earlier. Shitty and Lardo, who won’t go by anything else, not for love or money, draped over each other drowsily at a table near the dance floor. A sprinkle of Poindexters, a plethora of Nurses-- Fatima had played the brides down the aisle, and she glittered from every square inch of herself.

And then the screw loose. The odd couple. The stubborn blazers of their own path, Will and Derek. Will resting his head on Derek’s shoulder, looking sleepy; Derek smiling gently down at the dance floor as they turn, slowly, to Nora Jones. Ford could swear she’d seen them arguing over a book, something small, just minutes ago. Glowing like it was their favorite sport. 

Humans. Always more complicated than she gave them credit for.


End file.
